Then & Now: Organizing innovation—from the Moon landing to a $1.8 trillion space economy

February 26, 2026Created to mark 100 years of McKinsey, Then and Now explores defining client impact through moments that matter—from early innovations that reshaped sectors to what that looks like today.

In the early 1960s, a young NASA had a bold vision: to land humans on the Moon. But the organization was navigating intense geopolitical pressure and operating challenges. It quickly recognized that breakthrough innovation would not succeed without new ways of working.

“Brilliant minds were solving impossible problems, but scattered across disconnected teams,” as Paul Lasewicz, McKinsey’s archivist, tells it. “The structure of the organization couldn’t support that kind of ambition.” McKinsey was brought into this tension to address a more fundamental question: how could an organization built for research be redesigned to reliably execute the most complex engineering program in history?

“McKinsey studied the complexity across people, programs, and agencies and then helped design an entirely new kind of operating system for space,” Paul says.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the firm continued to support NASA during the Space Shuttle era, working with the Space Transportation System to apply management insights from the business world as the agency adapted from a research-driven organization to an operational one.

The program revealed a lasting truth: at the frontier, innovation fails not because of a lack of ideas, but because organizations are not designed to integrate, sequence, and execute them under pressure. It requires management systems deliberately designed to balance experimentation and reliability, speed and safety, autonomy and coordination. Long before “innovation operating models” entered the lexicon, NASA was pioneering them—demonstrating that how innovation is organized can be as decisive as the discoveries themselves.

Today, leaders face a familiar question in a vastly more complex environment: how to scale innovation for impact well beyond one mission. The space economy is no longer defined by a single mission or actor and is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, creating an interconnected system where innovation must move continuously, not episodically. The scale is unprecedented, but the managerial challenge is familiar.

McKinsey’s work in space today reflects this shift from discrete programs to enduring innovation systems. The firm works with governments, investors, and space companies to design operating models, governance, and capital strategies that allow innovation to scale reliably across missions, portfolios, and markets. McKinsey also supports companies across sectors, from energy and logistics to agriculture and technology services, seeking to leverage space-based capabilities to drive growth and operational advantage.

Although the marketplace has changed dramatically, organizations are still grappling with many of the same foundational questions. “Similar questions hold true for established players and disruptors,” says Ryan Brukardt, a senior partner at McKinsey. “How do companies attract the right external capital? What does the organization’s operating model and structure need to look like? What should—or should not—be in their technology portfolio?”

As in the early days of human spaceflight, the challenge is not a lack of ideas, but designing innovation systems that can move quickly, learn continuously, and translate ambition into impact at scale.

Next: Designing innovation that endures

As space becomes a continuously evolving system rather than a sequence of missions, innovation cannot rely on heroic efforts or one-time transformations. Enduring advantage will belong to organizations that design management systems capable of learning, coordinating, and adapting at scale.

Then, McKinsey helped leaders like NASA replace intuition with disciplined ways of working under extreme uncertainty. Today, that same principle is guiding organizations as they explore what’s next in space.

“We are so close to unlocking the power of data from space, and a number of non-space players are already seeing the benefits,” says Alizée Acket-Goemaere, a consultant in McKinsey’s Boston office. “The next step is to bring these use cases at scale, with the potential to transform industries like logistics, energy and agriculture.” Alongside data, other future moonshots—from orbital data centers to in-space manufacturing—signal bold innovation bets that could have profound impacts on life on Earth.

A half-century ago, better management helped make human spaceflight possible. Now, it is shaping how innovation unfolds across the space economy—continuously, collaboratively, and at the frontier—turning bold ideas into capabilities that can scale on Earth and beyond.