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Comment by Railsify | Hacker News Reader

Boom, how many people are in space?

Only about five people. But there's also an economy almost unrelated to those people that brings in $330,000,000,000 a year via satellites of various sorts. And if more of the internet starts getting routed through LEO that number is likely to go up a lot.

Satellites and rockets have a lot of regulation. SpaceX for example needed FCC approval before launching test satellites for it’s internet project.

Satellites seem largely unregulated because they impact such a small number of things. It’s not not like the FDA is relevant when it’s all photons being sent back and forth.

>Satellites seem largely unregulated

Also, because when a company like Swarm launches even after their licenses are denied, all they get is a slap on the wrist.

There are a lot of regulations but if you read the article it's about ways in which current regulation of space are proving inadequate.

Is that an actual statistic on the space economy? Do you have a source?

I've actually seen larger numbers, but that's probably ballpark

Launch is the part of the space industry that gets the most consistent PR, but it's a relatively small piece of the pie. A rocket launch may cost $50-300 million, but the payload on that rocket may have cost billions to design and build.

One source for $385 billion in 2017: https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-space-ec...

Source for $330-350 billion: https://spacenews.com/a-trillion-dollar-space-industry-will-...

https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

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