Navigating the New Space Economy: An Expert's View on Aerospace and Defence Market Intelligence
Introduction: Meet the Expert
Dr. Sophia Rennert has spent over eighteen years at the intersection of aerospace engineering and strategic market intelligence. After a decade at a leading European defence prime contractor, she transitioned to found her own boutique research consultancy specialising exclusively in aerospace, defence, and space commercialisation. Her clients range from NATO procurement agencies to Series B space-tech start-ups. We sat down with her to explore the unique methodological challenges of conducting market research in one of the world's most complex and sensitive industrial sectors.
The Market Landscape: Sizing the Opportunity
Interviewer: Sophia, let's start with the fundamentals. How would you characterise the current state of the aerospace and defence market from a research perspective?
Dr. Rennert: It's genuinely one of the most dynamic periods I've seen in my career, and that creates both enormous opportunity and real complexity for researchers. The global aerospace and defence market was valued at approximately $928 billion in 2023, and depending on which segment you're looking at, CAGR projections range from 3.8% for legacy defence platforms up to 17.2% for the commercial space segment through 2030. That dispersion alone tells you something important: this is not a monolithic market. You need to segment rigorously or you risk producing research that is technically accurate but strategically useless.
Interviewer: What are the most significant market shifts you're currently tracking?
Dr. Rennert: Three things dominate the agenda right now. First, the re-nationalisation of defence spending following the war in Ukraine. NATO members' collective defence expenditure rose to $1.34 trillion in 2024, with European members collectively exceeding the 2% GDP target for the first time. This is reshaping procurement pipelines dramatically and creating new research questions around industrial base capacity, supply chain sovereignty, and workforce availability. Second, the commercialisation of low Earth orbit — what everyone calls the New Space economy. We're seeing companies like SpaceX, Planet Labs, and a growing cohort of European and Asian start-ups commoditising capabilities that were once the exclusive preserve of national space agencies. And third, the integration of AI and autonomous systems into both military and civilian aerospace platforms, which raises entirely new questions around certification, liability, and public acceptance.
"The biggest mistake researchers make in aerospace and defence is treating procurement decisions as purely rational economic choices. They are deeply political, institutional, and relational — and your methodology has to account for all three dimensions." — Dr. Sophia Rennert
Methodological Challenges: Research in a Classified World
Interviewer: How do you approach primary research in a sector where so much information is classified or commercially sensitive?
Dr. Rennert: This is the central methodological challenge of our field, and it requires what I call a 'mosaic intelligence' approach. You rarely get full disclosure from any single source, so you build your picture from many partial data points — published export control filings, Federal Register notices in the US, Hansard parliamentary debates in the UK, European Defence Agency (EDA) public reports, SIPRI's arms transfer databases, and earnings call transcripts from publicly listed primes like Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Airbus. Each source individually is incomplete; together they form a credible and defensible analytical mosaic.
Interviewer: What about primary research — surveys and interviews with decision-makers?
Dr. Rennert: Access is everything. Standard B2B panel providers simply do not have the depth of coverage in this sector. The people who matter — programme directors, procurement officers, platform engineers — are not on consumer panels. You build access over years through industry events like the Farnborough Airshow, DSEI, and the Paris Air Show; through professional associations like the ADS Group in the UK or the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) in the US; and frankly through reputation. When you've produced research that practitioners find genuinely useful, doors open.
For surveys, I strongly recommend Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) for senior defence and government stakeholders rather than online self-completion. Response rates are higher, data quality is superior, and the conversational dynamic often surfaces nuances that a structured questionnaire would never capture. For qualitative depth work, in-person expert interviews with a semi-structured protocol are still the gold standard — video conferencing has improved but nothing replaces physical presence when you're trying to understand the cultural dynamics of a procurement organisation.
The New Space Research Opportunity
Interviewer: You mentioned the commercial space sector. What specific research opportunities does this create?
Dr. Rennert: It's a researcher's dream, honestly, because the market is moving so fast that almost every strategic question is genuinely open. Launch cost economics, satellite constellation economics, in-orbit servicing viability, spectrum allocation politics, debris mitigation regulation — these are all areas where rigorous research can have real commercial value. SpaceX's Starlink alone has disrupted the satellite communications market in ways that analysts are still trying to fully model. Morgan Stanley estimates the global space economy could reach $1 trillion by 2040, and right now the research community is significantly under-serving that opportunity.
For researchers wanting to enter this space — no pun intended — I'd recommend starting with a strong grounding in the regulatory framework: the Outer Space Treaty, national licensing regimes, ITU spectrum coordination processes. Understanding regulatory constraints is essential for understanding market structure in space commercialisation.
Tools, Frameworks, and the Future of Aerospace Research
Interviewer: What tools and frameworks do you consider essential for aerospace and defence market researchers?
Dr. Rennert: Beyond the obvious — robust secondary data platforms like Jane's, Aviation Week Intelligence Network, and Forecast International — I'm increasingly enthusiastic about war-gaming and scenario planning methodologies as research tools. They force clients and stakeholders to articulate assumptions about competitor behaviour, technology trajectories, and geopolitical developments that structured surveys rarely surface. We run structured war-games for defence clients that produce richer competitive intelligence than months of desk research.
For quantitative modelling, system dynamics frameworks are particularly well-suited to defence procurement because they capture the feedback loops between budget cycles, industrial capacity, and strategic requirements that simpler linear models miss. Tools like Vensim or AnyLogic are worth investment.
Finally, and I cannot emphasise this enough — invest in your own security awareness and data handling protocols. Aerospace and defence research frequently touches on export-controlled information, and researchers who are cavalier about data security not only risk legal exposure but permanently damage their credibility with clients who operate in classified environments.
Interviewer: Sophia, thank you — this has been genuinely illuminating.
Dr. Rennert: My pleasure. It's a sector that rewards deep expertise, and I hope more researchers choose to make it their focus.