随着火箭发射变便宜：500强公司将竞逐“太空资源”

    航天及国防咨询公司蒂尔集团航天研究总监马可•卡塞雷斯称：“请牢记，无论什么时候开始发射更多卫星，只要能大幅降低发射服务的价格，带来更多新入行的企业，就会产生大量连带效应。这样就能获得一个规模不断扩大的市场和各种细分市场，还能使投资者认真考量SpaceX及其他类似公司。风投就会像1990年代那样重新涌入这个市场。”

    新兴航天公司已在自己的商业计划里大幅降低了发射成本。戴维表示，在未来十年中，航天业的重要性就好比1990年代的互联网。它并不会立刻颠覆传统产业的收入模式。但如果不认真思考航天探索将对自己商业模式产生的影响，以及如何充分利用这一趋势，就会将自己置于巴诺书店当年面对亚马逊崛起时所处的那种境地。

    “挑战在于，要理解可循环一级推进器这类装备对目前世界上盛行的商业模式的影响。如果你恰好是可口可乐、沃尔玛、丰田、卢克石油这样的企业，卫星和你目前的商业模式有何关系呢？发射成本大幅下降与你未来的商业模式有何关系？在我们看来，那些能在这两者之间建立联系的企业将抓住大量增长机遇，而那些无法理解这种关系的企业在未来十年可能会走下坡路，” 戴维称。

    戴维表示，多数公司并不认为自己是“航天公司”。但在《财富》500强企业中，很难发现有几家是和陆上资产无关的——不管是房地产、农业、交通基础设施、能源基础设施还是实体建筑。能用独有方式连接所有这些资产，实时监控它们并实时获得精确的信息，将确保21世纪的企业获得竞争优势。

    对那些依靠快速准确的信息，并能独家获取这些信息才能获得收入的企业来说，这更是真切无疑。戴维表示：“像贝莱德集团和阿波罗公司这样的企业想拥有自己的卫星，这难道不是显而易见吗？我想，如果去问华尔街上大多数基金公司和投行对此事的看法，他们肯定会说，‘航天？开什么玩笑。’”但在不久的将来，我们就会看到，随着发射成本降低，更多卫星上天，信息量将更快增长。这将导致一些可能深刻改变金融分析本质的结果。”

    位于斯坦福德市的能源贸易商们是否会竞相争取最好的轨道来监测马六甲海峡的油轮数量，这谁也说不准。但SpaceX公司近期火箭回收“失败”的启示是：占领太空就能获得信息，下一轮太空竞赛将来自于那些竞相成为“航天公司”的企业。（财富中文网）

    译者：清远

    审校：任文科

    “Keep in mind that whenever you start launching more satellites, when you make launch services cheaper and bring new players into the market, you have a lot of spinoff effects,” Marco Caceres, director of space studies at aerospace and defense consultancy Teal Group. “You have an expanding market, you have submarkets. And you have investors taking a second, a third, a fourth look at companies like SpaceX and the ones that will follow. Venture capital will start flowing back into the market like it did in the 1990s.”

    Emerging space companies are already baking lower launch costs into their business plans. Space is to the decade ahead what the Internet was to the 1990s, NewSpace Global’s David says. It’s not necessarily going to upend your revenue streams tomorrow. But if you’re not thinking about how space access impacts your business and how to leverage it to your advantage, you’re setting yourself up as the Barnes and Noble BKS -0.16% to someone else’s Amazon AMZN -0.94% .

    “The challenge is understanding the impact something like a reusable first stage booster will have upon a very terrestrial business model today,” NewSpace Global’s David says. “If you’re Coca-Cola, if you’re Walmart, if you’re Toyota, if you’re Lukoil—what does a satellite have to do with your business model today? What will falling launch costs have to do with your business model in the future? From our perspective, the companies capable of connecting those dots will be able to capture tremendous financial growth opportunities. Those who fail to understand that connection to their very terrestrial business models could end up on the wrong side of financial evolution in the next decade.”

    Most companies don’t think of themselves as “space companies,” David says. But it’s hard to find a company on the Fortune 500 that isn’t intimately connected to terrestrial assets—real estate, agriculture, transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, brick and mortar facilities. The ability to connect all those assets in a proprietary way, to monitor them in realtime and generate accurate and instantaneous information about them will ensure a competitive edge for companies in the 21st century.

    That’s especially true for firms who rely on fast, accurate information—and proprietary access to that information—to generate revenue. “Is it obvious that someone like BlackRock or Apollo would care about having their own satellites?” David says. “I think if you were to poll most PE firms and IBs on Wall Street they would say, ‘Space? You gotta be kiddin’ me.’ But what we’re going to see in the near term as launch costs come down, as more satellites are lifted, is an increase in knowledge at higher frequency. That’s going to lead to results that could change the very nature of financial analysis.”

    Whether or not Stamford-based energy traders will soon find themselves jockeying for the choicest orbits from which to count oil tankers in the Strait of Malacca is anyone’s guess. But the takeaway from SpaceX’s most recent rocket recover “failure” is this: access to space is access to knowledge, and the next space race will be among companies vying to be a “space company.”