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Preface

Economic considerations have long remained secondary in space activities. For many years, satellites, space probes, and launchers have been purchased mainly by military customers and space agencies. For these customers, military, political prestige, and scientific considerations predominate. Taking advantage of space technologies to sell a telephone or meteorological service was a marginal objective within space activities.

The end of the Cold War profoundly changed the space industry. It largely contributed to establishing the commercialization of space as a fundamental trend. Although there have been fluctuations since 1990, the weight of economic considerations has continued to increase. Since 2010, it has crossed such a threshold that represents a major challenge for all stakeholders in the industry. For example, developing space technologies by trying first and foremost to take advantage of technological and scientific opportunities becomes dangerous. More emphasis must now be placed on identifying market opportunities.

Faced with this challenge, very little work has placed economic considerations and the transformation of the space industry at the center of their analysis. Space industry stakeholders may, therefore, have difficulty in legitimizing the new weight of economic considerations. The main objective of this book is to fill this gap by proposing a study of the space industry based on innovation management.

We have identified three main issues:

 – The space industry was born out of the desire of the Russian and American military to gain an advantage at the beginning of the Cold War. How can we describe the evolution of this industry shaped by customers?

 – The space industry produces high-tech products that paradoxically carry few recent electronic components and are developed through processes largely inspired by what was done in the 1950s. How should the conservatism of this high-tech industry be interpreted?

 – Small satellites feed the current phase of accelerating the commercialization of space and could be a substitute for traditional satellites built by existing firms. In this context, how can we help existing firms determine whether this technological promise is a threat to be taken seriously or rather a fad?

This book is the result of research conducted since 2003 in the space industry. Since 2013, we have structured our research around the SIRIUS Chair (www.chaire-sirius.eu). The objective of this chair is to conduct research in management sciences and law applied to the space sector. The SIRIUS Chair also focuses on the dissemination of research and training. We supervise, for the Toulouse Business School, the activities in management science conducted in the SIRIUS Chair.

We would like to thank Dimitri Uzunidis, Honorary President of the Réseau de Recherche sur l’Innovation (https://rrifr.univ-littoral.fr), for giving us the opportunity to publish this book.

Victor DOS SANTOS PAULINO

October 2019