The Market Takes Shape

Four major research firms have published ISAM market valuations since 2024, with estimates ranging from $2.09 billion to $4.67 billion for the same year. The spread reflects genuine analytical disagreement about scope, not methodology. What every firm agrees on is direction: every published CAGR falls between 7.7 and 10.6 percent for servicing, well above the broader space economy's 5 to 6 percent. A separate projection puts in-space manufacturing at $62.8 billion by 2040 at 29.7 percent CAGR. Behind those numbers sits a 1,099-entity ecosystem, broad but fragile, with a 1.1 percent graduation rate from seed to Series E.

Capability Maturity: Uneven but Real

Six of the twelve ISAM capabilities defined by COSMIC now operate at a level the GAO classifies as "operational with remote assistance." Servicing leads: Northrop Grumman's MEV-1 completed the first commercial undocking in GEO in April 2025, and Orbit Fab has sold over 50 RAFTI refueling ports. Manufacturing is in proof-of-concept, with Varda flying five capsule missions and Space Forge firing the first commercial semiconductor furnace in LEO. Assembly lags furthest behind. No satellite has ever been autonomously assembled in orbit from separately launched components. It is an engineering solution that has not yet found a paying customer.

Policy: Progress and a Missing Center

The regulatory environment moved faster in 2025 than at any point in ISAM's history. Executive Order 14335 created the first federal authorization pathway for "novel space activities." The FCC proposed replacing its decades-old Part 25 framework. ISO 24330 delivered the first international standard for on-orbit servicing. But the National Space Council, the only federal body authorized to coordinate ISAM policy across NASA, DoD, Commerce, and the FAA, was dissolved in December 2025 with no replacement. The institutional infrastructure to coordinate ISAM policy is weaker in early 2026 than it was in 2023.

The Global Competition

The United States leads the world in commercial ISAM ecosystem breadth. China leads in sovereign demonstration pace: three generations of Shijian satellites added robotic manipulation, debris relocation, and satellite-to-satellite refueling in GEO between 2016 and 2025. China achieved GEO refueling before any U.S. entity. Allied nations are investing at scale: ESA committed EUR 955 million to its Space Safety Programme, Canada awarded MDA Space CAD $1 billion for Canadarm3, Japan funded ADRAS-J2 at 13.2 billion yen. Eleven major government programs across five countries have committed a combined total exceeding $4 billion.

Three Priority Recommendations

First, designate an interagency ISAM coordination body to replace the dissolved National Space Council's coordination function. Without a designated coordinator, actions requiring cross-agency alignment will continue to stall. Second, mandate designed-for-servicing standards across all new federal satellite procurements. The Space Force's RG-XX refueling mandate proved that procurement requirements can break the chicken-and-egg cycle that stalls ISAM adoption. Third, invest directly in assembly use cases. Assembly is the least mature ISAM vertical and the only one without a paying customer, yet the DoD needs it most for large-aperture sensors, orbital fuel depots, and modular space stations.

What Comes Next

The distance between what the technology can do and what institutions have organized to support defines the ISAM market in 2026. Servicing vehicles are completing contracts, manufacturing capsules are returning products to Earth, and autonomous robots are assembling trusses in orbit. The hardware works, the standards are arriving, and the regulations are forming. But the institutional coordination that binds these pieces into a functioning market has not kept pace. The question that defined the last decade, "does ISAM work?", has been answered. The question for the next five years is whether governments, standards bodies, and capital markets can scale fast enough to match what the engineers have already built.