The final frontier: is space where investors should boldly go next?

Space is influencing real estate profoundly – but not in the way early forecasts imagined.

In 2014, The Wealth Report predicted sub-orbital travel could revolutionise global mobility, slashing intercontinental journey times and reshaping prime property demand.

The prospect of space hosting physical real estate may not be light years away – but it remains a distant horizon. Today, the real opportunity lies in infrastructure and intelligence.

Physical real estate in space may be far off, but “space in space” is delivering tangible benefits on Earth now. For investors, space is already investable indirectly, through data infrastructure, analytics platforms, and companies enabling satellite intelligence.

The real estate industry in orbit

Beyond satellites, space offers unique physical properties, namely microgravity and a vacuum, that could transform manufacturing.

Welsh start-up Space Forge has secured Britain’s first in-space manufacturing licence, aiming to produce high-grade materials either difficult or impossible to make on Earth. But high costs and bringing cargo back to Earth are hurdles to overcome.

Also worth watching is Google’s Project Suncatcher: an AI-focused data centre designed to harness near-unlimited solar energy. With data centre energy consumption under the microscope, the potential is clear. Yet latency and reliability may prove impossible challenges to overcome.