Space companies tend to be cash intensive and require time to realize their visions

whether it's a new rocket that will launch spacecraft to orbit or a new satellite

constellation that must be built, deployed, and then come online. But for publicly traded space companies,

investors are entitled to an update every quarter,

even if the timeline will take years.

And much will change over the coming years.

Bank of America estimates the global commercial space economy will grow to more than a trillion dollars by 2030,

an exponential jump from the roughly 469 billion billion it totaled in 2021.

Ron Epstein is the bank's managing director covering aerospace and defense,

a top-ranking analyst many times over

in the institutional investor All America research poll.

We're equity analysts and equity analysts tend to spend all day looking at the income

statement and you know the drivers for that.

Having done work on a lot of these kind of newer space companies that are earlier stage in nature

That has forced us to become fixed income analysts. We will look at balance sheets and cashburn and I think probably probably one of the single biggest risks today is when you're

looking at an early stage company, will they have enough capital to get there?

Case in point Virgin Orbit, which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy,

but Epstein put space stocks in two buckets, new space economy and old space economy.

And he says, going through all of the financials Space Economy and Old Space Economy.

And he says, going through all of the financials

and weighing them against all of the emerging technologies,

that there's opportunities for both.

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