Nicole Junkermann on Reading the Space Economy Layer by Layer: Readiness Levels, Reusable Rockets and the AI Behind Orbit

Nicole Junkermann, founder of NJF Holdings, on the layers of the space economy

Nicole Junkermann's AI Overview site now has a space section with five free interactive tools. Two of them explain how the space economy fits together and how engineers judge whether new hardware is ready to fly, with SpaceX and artificial intelligence turning up at almost every step.

Most conversations about space still begin and end with the launch: the rocket clears the tower, and the story is over once the payload reaches orbit. What comes afterwards gets far less attention: the satellites that stay up for years, the antennas that talk to them, the data they send down and the companies that turn it into something useful on the ground. That is where most of the day-to-day work of the space economy happens.

Nicole Junkermann, the entrepreneur who founded NJF Holdings, wants that wider picture to be easier to follow. The new space section of her AI Overview site includes the Space Economy Explorer, which breaks the field into seven layers: rockets and launch, satellite making, ground antennas and links, Earth observation data, servicing and refuelling in orbit, research in microgravity, and the push to the Moon and further out. Every layer carries a label (established, growing or emerging) and a short note on the work done there and where AI comes in.

Why launch changed every layer above it

Launch is the layer the other six depend on, and it has moved more than any of them in the past decade. SpaceX showed that a rocket's first stage can fly back, land upright and be flown again, and that habit of reuse has made reaching orbit cheaper and more frequent. SpaceX also flies regular rideshare missions that carry dozens of small satellites on a single rocket, so a university team or a young company can get hardware into orbit without paying for a whole launch.

SpaceX is one of the companies NJF Capital, the venture firm Nicole Junkermann founded, has invested in. Her interest goes well past any single launch, though. What Nicole Junkermann tends to focus on is what regular, lower-cost access to orbit does for everything that relies on it, from the engineers designing satellites to the people on the ground who use the data.

Read Nicole Junkermann's explorer from the bottom up and the knock-on effects are easy to spot. Satellites that once waited years for a ride now go up in batches. Ground stations have had to keep pace, booking shorter, more frequent passes as constellations grow. Earth observation teams now receive more images than anyone could read by hand, which is where AI earns its place: models sort the cloud-free frames from the cloudy ones, flag a flooded field or a new stretch of road, and pass the interesting cases to a person for a closer look.

The scale engineers use to judge a new idea

The second tool deals with a question every engineer and every funder asks sooner or later: how close is this to working for real? Technology readiness levels, usually shortened to TRLs, answer it on a scale from 1 to 9. Level 1 means the basic principles have been observed and written up. Level 9 means the whole system has worked in actual missions. Space engineers devised the scale in the 1970s, and it has since spread into energy, defence and European research funding.

Nicole Junkermann's technology readiness level explorer follows one imaginary piece of hardware, a foldable solar panel for small satellites, from a laboratory observation all the way to a panel working in orbit. It's a simple device, and it makes a point that slide decks often skip. The stages that take longest tend to be the middle ones, when a prototype leaves the lab and has to show it can cope with the conditions it was built for. For space hardware that means the shaking of a launch, swings between deep cold and strong heat, and radiation that can flip a bit in memory.

AI helps at those middle stages too. Simulations and digital twins let engineers put a component through thousands of virtual launches before they build a single test unit, and machine learning can find patterns in test data that would take a team weeks to spot. Nicole Junkermann's view is that this speeds the work up without changing who answers for the result. As she says in one of her short AI briefings, "People still make the decision."

Where Nicole Junkermann sees AI across the seven layers

Go through Nicole Junkermann's explorer layer by layer and AI appears in all seven, doing very different jobs. In launch it helps design engine parts and plan trajectories. Satellite makers use it to inspect welds and circuit boards. Ground stations rely on it to schedule which antenna speaks to which satellite, and when. In Earth observation it reads the pictures. In orbit it can help a servicing craft line up with a satellite that was never built to be refuelled, and research teams use it to sort results from experiments run in microgravity.

None of this makes space simple, and Nicole Junkermann is careful about the claims she makes for it. Both tools are labelled as learning aids, and each sets out what is known without giving advice. That fits a line she uses about technology more broadly: "Progress only matters if it is human led and human shaped." The section's other three tools cover orbits, signal travel times and weight on other planets.

Frequently asked questions

1. What does Nicole Junkermann's Space Economy Explorer cover?

It maps the space economy as seven connected layers, from launch and satellite building through ground stations, Earth observation and services in orbit to research in microgravity and exploration of the Moon. Each layer is marked as established, growing or emerging, with notes on the work involved and the part AI plays.

2. What does a technology readiness level of 6 mean?

Level 6 means a model or prototype has been shown to work in a relevant environment. For space hardware that often means a vacuum chamber, a thermal test or a flight on a high-altitude balloon before anything goes to orbit.

3. Are Nicole Junkermann's space tools free to use?

Yes. Both tools, along with an orbit calculator, a signal delay calculator and a weight and age calculator, are in the space section of her AI Overview site. They run in the browser and nothing entered is stored.