Dark Skies Webinar Recap: How Space and Satellite Companies Can Win in a Booming Market
The space economy is no longer a niche. It’s infrastructure. With the global sector valued at over $626 billion and forecast to reach $1.8 trillion by 2030, the question for businesses across the supply chain is no longer whether the opportunity exists. It’s whether they’re positioned to take it.
Dark Skies was the first session in our Halston Horizon webinar series, run in association with Space Hub Yorkshire and the Space Women Alliance. We brought together three people who know this industry inside out to talk about where the money is going, what’s happening regionally, and why your marketing is probably letting your technology down.
Where the Investment is Going
Jodi Bartin, CEO of Citicourt & Co, knows the space investment landscape better than most. Her take was that the sector has grown up. Private capital hit $12.4 billion in 2025. Asia has tripled its space investment in five years. And 53% of the market now lives in downstream, space-enabled solutions: data services, connectivity, positioning tech. The infrastructure that quietly runs the world.
If you’re a founder trying to raise, Jodi was refreshingly blunt about what investors actually want. Stop pitching the technology and start pitching the business. Most investors in space rounds are generalists, who don’t understand the deep tech and frankly they don’t need to. What they need is a clear growth story, a credible M&A plan, and a path to exit.
In 2025, the median M&A uplift in the sector was 2.2 times. IPO multiples hit 9.2 times revenue. The opportunity is genuinely exciting, but it only lands if you can communicate it. That’s the real aerospace marketing problem.
What’s Happening On The Ground
Ken Brockbank from Space Hub Yorkshire brought some genuinely brilliant regional context. Yorkshire and Humber’s share of the UK space sector has grown from 3% to 5%, the highest regional growth rate in the country. Two significant FDI announcements are expected in 2026, bringing new production facilities to the region. Things are moving.
Ken also talked us through N-ACT, Northern Advanced Connectivity Technologies, the newly branded identity for Yorkshire’s world-class cluster of RF and microwave engineering companies. This cluster has existed for decades but never had a name, now it does, and that matters more than you might think. Branding it has allowed the cluster to collaborate, move up the value chain, and start showing up as a serious proposition to primes like Airbus and Lockheed Martin. Companies that used to supply individual components are now delivering full subsystems together. With sovereign capability at the top of every defence agenda right now, being a credible, connected, Western-built supplier is a real advantage.
SpaceTech Marketing Strategies That Make A Real Impact
For many technically excellent businesses, the gap isn’t in capability. It’s in go-to-market strategy. Jessica Farrow, Head of Digital Communications and Insight at Halston B2B, addressed the most common mistakes she sees in spacetech marketing; businesses spend all their time talking about what they’ve built and barely any time thinking about who needs to hear it, and why they should care.
Different stakeholders need completely different messages. An engineer and an investor and a procurement lead at a prime are not the same person. They don’t have the same priorities, they’re not in the same places, and they won’t respond to the same content. Knowing who you’re talking to and tailoring your message accordingly isn’t a nice extra. It’s the whole job.
On visibility, Jess was equally direct. SEO is a long game. Expect six to twelve months before meaningful rankings emerge, but it’s worth building the bedrock now, particularly in a sector where new search behaviours are developing rapidly.
In the short term, sector publications, industry associations, events, and targeted lead generation campaigns on platforms like LinkedIn can bridge the gap while organic presence builds.
For businesses expanding into new markets, a separate website on a new domain is almost never the answer. Sector-specific pages or subdomains that contribute to a single, authoritative web presence will always serve you better.
The Takeaway
The investment is real and the supply chain opportunity is wide open, but this market is getting more competitive and the window to build a strong position isn’t unlimited. The businesses putting the work into their visibility, their messaging, and their commercial narrative now are the ones that will be front of mind when the big contracts start moving. Great technology will only take you so far.
If you want to know where you actually stand, we’re offering a free B2B Marketing Audit or Competitor Analysis. We’ll look at your current positioning, identify the gaps, and give you something genuinely useful to act on. Claim your free audit today!