Negative Space
Here's a theory of how to make money investing in space: you don't.
Space is where you go to lose a lot of money.
It turns out space is better suited for fictional fantasy operas, science experiments and spy gear than it is for making money. Most of the history of space has been bloated government-funded adventures. If anyone makes money from space, its companies selling things for science adventures or spy gear. Those companies sometimes lose money too.
Two things are true about space: it's hard - it's is rocket science - and it's expensive. The entire enterprise relies on blowing things up and blowing them up in a very particular direction so that they go where you want them to like into orbit rather than, you know, all over. The blowing-things-up-in-the-right-direction bit has become more reliable in recent years. SpaceX has done a lot of heavy lifting here.
Once you figure out how to blow things up to where you need them, though, your work goes fully remote. Forever. You can never get to your gear again. If you forget to tighten a nut, you're SOL. Or, if the sun burns a bit too brightly, your satellites take an early retirement.
What to look for in a date
Some franchises born in space have made money. They usually turn out to be things useful back on Earth - the ball point pen, Velcro, freeze dried ice cream (kidding, that stuff is awful). These things share two other features in addition to being useful on Earth: they're cheap, and easy.
Solve those things and you can make a go at running a "space" business.
Size Matters
In 2010, Planet Labs founder Will Marshall, first took on the expensive piece of this problem. He was skeptical that immaculately engineered large-format satellites were the solution to every space problem. Frustrated while using tweezers to piece together parts for Nasa’s Moon Roomba, he asked "I wonder if I could strap some solar panels to my phone, throw it into space and make a call?" He did. It worked! Or something like that, anyway.
Sending something bigger into space makes it more expensive. Sending small things into space makes it cheap. Engineering everything from scratch makes space hard. Buying things off an assembly line makes it easy.
Planet’s budget, off-the-shelf approach was a critical departure from the conventional years-long/tens-of-millions-over-budget capital cycles of traditional satellite efforts. It was cheap and easy.
Earth selfies, though, weren't that useful back on the ground. Yet.
Spot the Difference
Another critical moment for the company came, probably, when Will was having breakfast, paging through the Sunday paper and landed on the comic page where there was one of those "Spot five differences" challenges with two side-by-side pictures that my kids like. "Aha" he said "We can do this, but from space!"
It could detect changes between the pictures it took today and the ones it took yesterday and the day before etc. It could also tease out values from the images it collected to measure other useful differences. The company began moving towards a measuring machine, away from just taking pretty pictures from space.
Today, Planet Labs runs a fleet of around 200 earth observation satellites. They take pictures of the earth - all of it, every day - and tell the company's customers things like "there's a new road here, update your map," or "this crop needs some water, go do that," or "that giant balloon carrying a bus with cameras over Idaho did come from China." They pick out changes and measure things that customers wouldn't be able to get at another way.
New Tricks
All this stuff has value, but Planet hasn't made money yet. Management plans to learn how to do that profit thing by the end of next year, but they have checked the boxes to get there from space: make something cheap, easy, and useful on Earth.