ARI METHODOLOGY

What ARI Measures

ARI (Aerospace Risk Index) is a proprietary composite risk score (0–100) that evaluates the financial health and operational risk of space industry companies. Higher scores indicate lower risk. It synthesizes financial fundamentals with space-industry-specific operational metrics to produce a single comparable indicator across public and private companies, launch providers, satellite operators, and defense primes.

Risk Factor Categories

ARI evaluates companies across three weighted categories containing eleven individual factors. Each factor is scored independently and combined into a category-weighted composite.

Scoring Approach

Each of the eleven factors is scored on a 0–10 scale and assigned to one of three category groups. The composite ARI score is computed as a category-weighted sum normalized to a 0–100 range, where higher scores indicate lower risk.

Factors that cannot be computed from available data are handled through a confidence-weighted methodology: default-confidence factors are excluded from the composite rather than dragging scores to the midpoint. This ensures that companies with partial data coverage are scored on their available signals rather than penalized for missing information.

Private companies without public financial disclosures receive stage-informed priors calibrated by funding round (seed through pre-IPO), ownership structure (subsidiary, joint venture), and sector. This enables meaningful risk differentiation across the full spectrum from pre-seed startups to publicly traded incumbents.

Risk labels are assigned based on calibrated score thresholds derived from the observed distribution of tracked companies, ranging from Very Low Risk to Very High Risk.