The state of space startups in 2026

I started listing space startups in 2019. They were mostly young companies, from pre-seed to Series B, and most had been founded between 2014 and 2018. I picked them by hand because they looked like the ones that would matter. SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were on the list too. By the end of that year it held 106 companies.

The list kept growing for a while, and then the site sat still while the space economy boomed. That turned out to be the most useful thing about it. A directory nobody updates becomes a sealed record of who looked promising at the time. In 2026 I went back through every company added in 2019, one by one, against the documented public record. None was dropped from the count. Here is what happened to them.

The headline numbers

Of the 106 startups added in 2019:

• 49 are active (46%): still operating, each one checked.
• 9 graduated (8%). Eight reached public markets: SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Planet, Spire, Firefly, Astroscale, ispace and HawkEye 360. Blue Origin is a giant without a ticker.
• 21 were acquired (20%).
• 15 shut down (14%).
• 12 are dormant (11%): no sign of life for years and no documented end. Dormant is the honest answer when the record shows neither activity nor death.

Put another way: 58 are still independent, eight of them public. 21 were bought. 27 are dead or dormant.

More than one in four left through a sale or a listing

Count acquisitions and public listings together and 29 of the 106 left the independent list, 27%. Most of the acquisitions were ordinary deals between space companies: OneWeb into Eutelsat, Made In Space into Redwire, Astrobotic into Voyager. A few were something else. Two were majority stakes (Accion Systems and Sensar). FluroSat merged with Dagan in 2021 to form Regrow Ag. Three were sales of what was left after the business had stalled: BridgeSat's technology, Phase Four's thruster lines and Because Learning's products.

Two buyers kept coming back. Voyager bought Altius Space in 2019, agreed at the end of 2020 to take a majority stake in Nanoracks, bought BridgeSat's technology in 2025 and completed its purchase of Astrobotic in July 2026. York Space Systems agreed to buy ATLAS Space Operations in 2025 and All.Space in 2026.

Most buyers were space companies. The oddest exception was IonQ, a quantum-computing company, which bought the radar imager Capella Space in 2025.

Firefly's path was the least likely. The original company ran into money trouble in 2016, and its assets were sold at a foreclosure auction in March 2017. The buyer, backed by Max Polyakov, renamed itself Firefly Aerospace, and the old company filed for bankruptcy. The new Firefly made the first fully successful commercial Moon landing in March 2025 and listed on Nasdaq five months later.

Most of the deaths were quiet

Only five of the 15 shutdowns made the news: Vector's bankruptcy and Audacy's shutdown in 2019, Leo Aerospace in 2021, Reaction Engines in 2024 and Orbex in 2026. The rest had to be established one company at a time, from company registries in the UK, Germany, Spain, Colorado and Missouri, Y Combinator's own "inactive" flag, and similar records. Six companies we had marked as shut down turned out to have no document of their end at all. Four of them are now marked dormant. Of the other two, Gold Orbit's Colorado company has been delinquent since 2020, and Marstronauts was a one-person project whose founder has moved on.

Dead websites mislead in both directions. The old domains of two directory companies now serve escort ads. Others host a prayer-times site, a freight blog, a sports-nutrition blog, two online-gambling pages and an air-conditioning firm in Nîmes. A scraper that trusts "official websites" would link to every one of them. Meanwhile some companies with no visible activity are still filing: Black Arrow, which has never reported a launch, still files accounts at Companies House.

Count only the shutdowns that made the news, five of 106, and the sector looks nearly immortal. Treat every dead website as a dead company and you bury companies that are still around. Every status here but one comes from a document. Where there is no document, the company is marked dormant.

Where the dead concentrated

Eight of the 15 shutdowns were launch or propulsion companies: Vector, Bagaveev, Leo Aerospace, ShipInSpace, Stofiel Aerospace, Orbex and Zero 2 Infinity on the launch side, and Reaction Engines in propulsion. No Earth observation or software company shut down.

Reaction Engines worked on SABRE for 35 years. It went into administration in October 2024 and cut 173 of its 208 staff. In June 2026 an undisclosed buyer paid £884,000 for its intellectual property.

Orbex raised £138.5M and never flew its Prime rocket. When it went into administration in February 2026, the administrators reported £689,000 in cash against a £117M deficit.

By country

• United States: 53 companies, 22 exits (42%), 13 dead or dormant (25%).
• United Kingdom: 13 companies, 2 exits (Space Impulse, bought by The Quantum Insider in 2022, and All.Space, which York agreed to buy in 2026), 6 dead or dormant (46%). That is the worst rate of any country with more than five companies on the list. Five of the 15 shutdowns were British.
• Japan, measured across today's full directory because the 2019 list held only two Japanese companies: 13 companies, five public listings, no deaths.

What 2019 got right, and wrong

Seven years on, 58 of the 106 are still independent, eight of them public. 21 were bought. 27 are dead or dormant.

The pick I believed in most was Moon Express. A private company going to the Moon felt like where the whole industry was heading, and in 2016 it became the first to win US approval for a private lunar landing. It never reached the Moon, and the last thing on its record is NASA picking it in November 2018 as one of nine companies to carry payloads there. The one I nearly left off was HawkEye 360, because mapping radio signals from space sounded like a small market. In May 2026 it listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Methodology

The cohort is the 106 companies added to Space Bandits during 2019, taken from the old site's own records. Another 25 were added between 2020 and 2025. They are left out because several joined after they had already gone public, which would flatter the results.

Every status comes from the documented public record: press coverage, company filings, court and registry records, and official announcements. A dead website alone never made a company "shut down"; those companies are marked dormant. The one exception is Marstronauts, a one-person project I have marked shut down because I know its founder moved on. Statuses are as of 7 November 2026. Statuses, sources and timelines are public on each company's record, and corrections are fixed the same day. Full standards are on how we verify.

Sources

Each claim sits on the linked company record with this source. The sources were checked between 27 September and 7 November 2026. The old domains described above were visited on 7 November 2026.