Three instruments for one question: who actually buys?

The demand gap, reframed: the distance a firm must travel.

Public programmes, agency contracts and defence procurement fund the technology and the first revenue. They do not convert on their own into recurring revenue from private customers. The framework maps that transition on two axes: customer-base maturity (institutional to recurring) and business-model repeatability (one-off projects to repeatable products).

Two paths lead out of quadrant A: productisation (changing what you sell, A→C) and demand maturation (changing who pays, A→B→D). The framework is a diagnostic drawn from a seven-firm case study of European NewSpace companies, not a validated model, and it supports claims about sequence and position, never causality. The seven were chosen for analytical variety rather than to represent the sector, and positions within a quadrant are ordinal rather than measured. Around that sits the breadth: 205 company observations across the two datasets below, which test whether the pattern holds beyond the cases. The full analysis appears in my research paper and in The Demand Side.

What the sector actually hires for.

Hiring is a budget decision, so the roles a company keeps open show where it is really investing in commercial growth. The Commercial Hiring Index reads the public job boards of European space companies and measures one thing: the commercial share of open positions, recomputed quarterly on a fixed company list.

9.2%

Across a panel of 100 European space companies and 1,109 open positions, commercial roles are 9.2 per cent of all open positions. Set against engineering roles alone, that is 7.7 engineering vacancies for every commercial one. Where a buyer is named at all, it is usually government or defence.

Put plainly: across the four launch companies with a countable board, five people were being hired to find a customer.

A smaller fixed panel of 44 companies is recomputed each quarter to track the trend; it stood at 8.7 per cent in July 2026. Both panels put the commercial share around nine per cent, so the pattern is not an artefact of which companies I picked. No single company is the point here. The pattern is the backdrop that makes a clear commercial story cheap to stand out against. Method, counting rules and the full company table are in Research note 01 (PDF).

Version 2, July 2026. The hiring index is recomputed each quarter. The website audit is re-run when the sample changes. Where a count is revised, the correction is published with it rather than folded in quietly. Next revision Q4 2026.

How the counting is checked. Every dataset is collected once, re-added arithmetically in full, and spot-checked live: six hiring boards chosen across the size range, and a random sample of the audited sites. Four corrections came out of the last round and are published with the figures. Where something stays uncertain, it is reported as uncertain rather than smoothed over.

And what the sector's own websites say.

The third dataset reads 105 European space company websites the way a buyer would, of which 98 could be read at all, and codes six things: whether the site names a use case, says who it is for, leads with an outcome, names a paying customer, shows a way to buy, and offers a real next step. Half the field names a buyer. Fewer than half show any way to buy. For 58 of the 98, a contact form is the only door.

Rather than describe that, I have published it. Every coded site is open to inspect, sortable by segment and by country, with the counting rules alongside.