Rich Get Richer Effect in Space Travel
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.32.2.173
The space industry is potentially one of the fastest growing fields in the next few decades, with the potential of drastically affecting the life of every human on Earth. However, the field is incredibly hard to predict since it was only a few decades ago that private spaceflight even came to exist, and there have been massive, exponential growth rates. However, space travel is very complicated, and being successful in space requires mastering a wide variety of technologies considered very difficult in current times such as propulsion technology, closed loop life support, in situ resource utilization, and reusable spacecraft. The scale of a mission that is possible, and is corresponding value, is based on the number of these technologies available. The resources and opportunities in space dwarf those that exist on Earth by orders of magnitudes, so the potential payoffs are enormous if a group can put all of these difficult technologies together.
This leads to a very strong rich-get-richer model since any organization that is able to master even a single technology will be able to dominate the market for years to come, the barriers to entry are enormous, the best space startups need about $150 million in order to produce their first rockets. This disparity gets increasingly larger as a group develops more technologies as their lead gets harder to recoup and the amount of money they have to further develop grows drastically. The massive uncertainty that comes with rich-get-richer effects is greatly evident in space travel as well since there are currently dozens of startups trying to enter the industry, but estimates suggests that only a few will be able to ultimately survive. Exactly which organizations survive is hard to predict, though some organizations have shown much faster progress on maturing these difficult technologies than others. Current industry leaders have either been using one or more of these technologies for decades or have developed technology to a new, higher state of the art compared to previous attempts, which shows that even now the rich get richer effect is quite strong.