The Next Frontier Isn’t Higher—It’s Lower

Reflections from SatShow 2026 on where the space economy actually goes next.

By Shashank Kaul
CEO • JivaJet

Walking the floor at SatShow this year, one thing became clear: most of the industry is still focused on the same question—how to go higher, faster, farther. Bigger constellations, higher orbits, more coverage.

That’s progress. But it’s also a signal. The current layer of the space economy is maturing.

And when a layer matures, the next phase of value creation doesn’t come from doing the same thing better. It comes from unlocking what wasn’t accessible before.

There’s a layer of orbit we’ve largely ignored.

Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO)—roughly 80 to 150 kilometers above Earth—is one of the most extreme environments we can reach, and one of the hardest to stay in. Atmospheric drag is relentless. Orbital decay is constant. Traditional propulsion systems weren’t built for it. So we built everything above it—not because it was optimal, but because it was survivable.

That constraint has defined the architecture of the modern space economy.

It’s also the next constraint to fall.

VLEO isn’t just “lower orbit.” It’s a fundamentally different operating environment—one that collapses the distance between space-based systems and the Earth itself. That has immediate implications: higher-resolution imaging, lower latency communications, more responsive sensing, and new defense and national security capabilities that operate closer to the point of need.

This isn’t incremental improvement. It’s a new layer of infrastructure.

And like any new layer, it doesn’t open up gradually. It unlocks when the enabling technology arrives.

In VLEO, that enabling technology is propulsion.

Getting there is not the challenge. Staying there is. Sustained operation in this environment requires continuous compensation for drag, efficient operation in a partial atmosphere, and systems designed for conditions most spacecraft are engineered to avoid.

This is not an iteration problem. It’s a first-principles problem.

At JivaJet, this is exactly what we’re building for.

Our propulsion systems are designed specifically for sustained operation in VLEO—making it possible not just to access this layer, but to remain there and operate within it. That shift—from transient access to persistent presence—is what turns an interesting technical domain into a viable market.

Because once persistence is solved, everything downstream changes.

Satellite design changes.
Mission profiles change.
Data products change.
And the expectations of end users change with them.

If VLEO becomes operational—and we believe it will—the implications are straightforward.

A new class of satellite architectures emerges.
Performance baselines for imaging and sensing reset.
Timelines between data capture and decision-making compress.
And a new competitive landscape forms around proximity, responsiveness, and persistence.

This is how new markets are created—not by extending the current model, but by making a new one possible.

During the week, I heard the same reaction more than once: “This sounds like science fiction.”

It should.

So did reusable rockets.
So did global satellite internet.
So did commercial launch.

The pattern is consistent: what starts as an edge case becomes infrastructure—once the constraint is removed.

That’s where we are now.

The physics of VLEO are not new. What’s been missing is the ability to operate there reliably.

That is the problem that defines the next generation of space infrastructure.

The next phase of the space economy won’t be defined by how far we can go. It will be defined by how effectively we can operate where others couldn’t—and how quickly that capability becomes foundational.

At JivaJet, we’re building the systems to make that possible.

And what’s going to enable it is a JivaJet thruster.

---

About the author
Shashank Kaul is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of JivaJet. A deep technology entrepreneur and systems architect, he has led large-scale modernization initiatives across U.S. federal agencies, translating complex technologies into deployable, mission-critical systems.

At JivaJet, Shashank is focused on advancing a new class of plasma-based technologies across aerospace and life sciences, including propulsion systems designed for sustained operation in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO). His work centers on unlocking new operational domains and building the infrastructure that enables them. You can find him on LinkedIn, here.

---