While any additional space might be welcomed among U.S. travelers — a 2012 federal report found 69 percent of adults were overweight — the promotional value of Southwest gaining less than one inch of seat width was questioned by Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Fairfax, Virginia-based consultant Teal Group. The “ultimate commodity market” is U.S. domestic flying, Aboulafia said in a phone interview. “People go to a website, click on price, period.”

Aviation consultant Richard Aboulafia of Virginia-based Teal Group, who has read the report, said Rand did “a good job of documenting (what) has been an open secret in the airplane business,” which is that flawed government policies have led to the failure of Chinese aircraft manufacturing. “The Chinese have great talent, a great market, and great resources,” Aboulafia said. “You have to work awfully hard to destroy its prospects of getting into commercial aviation.”

The boom in satellite demand is borne out by new statistics from Virginia-based Teal Group, a market research firm that serves the commercial and military aerospace sectors. Teal Group’s latest satellite survey, released in late 2013, identified 3,164 space payloads proposed for development and launch to earth or deep space orbits between 2013 and 2032. Teal estimates the value of these satellites and other space payloads at more than $235 billion.

The survey includes not only planned payloads but those that Teal determines will need to be developed and launched to replenish aging operational systems now in earth’s orbit. In addition to the initiation of brand new systems, the worsening decrepitude of satellites already aloft will provide plenty of demand for years to come, in the form of replacements.  Among the payloads surveyed by Teal, the company forecasts that roughly 830 of them will be built and launched from now until 2017, with commercial satellites making up 40 percent of the total.

An ability to cooperate on programs will be critical because countries are leaning on cost sharing as defense spending in many places falls, said Phil Finnegan, an analyst with the Teal Group. “Cooperation, that is a direction that the industry is going,” Finnegan said. “Japan is now moving in that direction as well.” But Finnegan said opportunity for economic gain through military equipment sales is likely years down the road because of the high manufacturing costs Japanese companies face. “Nothing is going to change quickly; maybe in the long run, they can play a role in the international market,” he said. “It’s a very insular industry, and by its nature, it’s going to be expensive.”

Aviation expert Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., called it “potentially good news” but warned that, even if the flight data recorder and cockpit data recorder are found, they might not contain all the information needed to unravel the mystery. The cockpit recorder, for example, keeps only the last two hours of audio, which “could be two hours of silence,” he said.