MASTER
PLAN
The long arc
There will not be a space economy.
Instead, every industry on Earth will add an orbital infrastructure layer. We intend to build it — starting with the ocean.
By Leo Pauly, CEO & Co-Founder01 — The thesis
People keep waiting for the space economy to arrive as a separate sector. It won't. What's actually happening is bigger and quieter: every terrestrial industry is growing an orbital layer — infrastructure in space that makes the ground-based business work better. Defence, connectivity, computing, energy, manufacturing. Not a new economy beside the old one. The old one, extended into orbit.
Plasma Orbital's ambition is to be the company that builds those layers.
02 — Why now
Two shifts make this the moment, not a decade from now.
Launch is collapsing in cost
Reusable heavy lift — Starship and what follows — is driving the price of reaching orbit down exponentially. What was prohibitive is becoming routine.
Satellites are becoming software
They're shifting from bespoke, hand-built hardware to software-defined, mass-manufactured platforms — the same transition that turned phones from hardware products into software ones. Capability now ships as code, and code can be updated after launch.
Together these turn orbit from a destination into infrastructure.
03 — The inflection
The ChatGPT moment for space.
Every general-purpose technology has an inflection point where it stops being specialist and becomes ambient. We expect space to reach its ChatGPT moment by 2030 — the point at which orbital infrastructure becomes an obvious, default layer for industry rather than an exotic capability for a few.
The companies that build the picks and shovels for that shift — the orbital layers themselves — will define the era.
04 — The proof
The proof is already visible, industry by industry.
Defence
Real-time, persistent orbital monitoring.
Connectivity
Beyond broadband to direct-to-cell.
Computing
Distributed, hybrid data centres spanning Earth and orbit.
Manufacturing, energy, and beyond
Each developing its own orbital infrastructure layer.
05 — The plan
The plan, in five steps.
06 — Why maritime first
A true hair-on-fire problem.
Maritime domain awareness is a true hair-on-fire problem. The ocean carries 80% of global trade, and the world can see only a fraction of what moves on it. Dark vessels, illegal fishing, piracy, sanctioned cargo, grey-zone aggression — tens of billions of dollars and national security, all unwatched, because no system delivers persistent intelligence at ocean scale.
That is our entry point. AI-MicroSats with onboard intelligence, watching the water continuously, are the first orbital layer we're building — and the foundation for every one after it.
See the problem in full in our white paper →, and the first mission in EdisonSat →.
This is the long arc
EdisonSat: mission one is where it starts.
Originally published on Substack. Read and subscribe there →