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“Ten, nine, eight, seven ... two, one,” the voice over the loudspeaker began the countdown.
One second later, the thrust of a newly designed rocket shakes the ground, its roar echoing for miles. In the control room, a group of employees—seemingly trying with all their might to match the rocket’s intensity—celebrate its liftoff. A launch-company executive is shouting, ecstatic the rocket is taking off rather than malfunctioning on the launch pad.
Cheering employees and inaudible celebrations might be a far cry from the near-poetic statements such as, “One small step for man, one giant leap from mankind,” from the dawn of the space age. But today’s space industry looks very different than it did more than 50 years ago when Neil Armstrong spoke those historic words.
What’s changed is the energy and competency of the private sector eager to tap into and grow the ecosystem of space. The government’s embrace and support of an energized private sector is also new. These changes can help justify the business risk of investing in space, aiding in the development of novel space capabilities that can unlock new ways of leveraging space for commercial, government, and scientific purposes.
As an industry changes, the connections and interdependencies between the industry’s players necessarily change too. The sum of those connections and interdependencies is how an industry is organized and operates. This is more commonly described as an “industry architecture.”1 All industries have a business architecture, which is constantly changing through government regulations and new innovations and industry participants.
The problem is that the space industry architecture hasn’t changed as quickly as space technology. With old ways of doing business, even new space activities may meet familiar space-sector business barriers, such as difficulty accessing new markets, large upfront financial requirements, and a murky regulatory environment.
As long as these barriers remain, it may be difficult to move beyond familiar space activities to help bring about the anticipated evolution in space that commercial companies, universities, and governments may be envisioning. In other words, without a new space-industry architecture, it will be harder for the industry to achieve bold new aspirations—whether that’s the often touted US$1 trillion-dollar industry market value or becoming more sustainable and inclusive.
A new industry architecture for the space sector must define new industry roles and responsibilities, improve trust, and be value-driven. Developing these qualities in a new industry architecture can be aided by advancing three space activities: development of in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM), space traffic management (STM), and satellite standards.
While each may sound unrelated to the other, they are symbiotic in nature. Together they will underwrite many of the new services and capabilities necessary to create new industry roles and responsibilities, develop trust among industry participants, and tap into entirely new space markets; or, more simply said, they can help usher in a new space-industry architecture.
Maturing these important space activities so they can reshape the space industry’s architecture requires charting a clear path from where the activities are today to where the industry will need them to be. A clear path forward should account for technology, policy, and business barriers that can affect the commercial viability of these activities, and what choices industry and government can make today to remove or reduce those barriers (figure 1).
There appears to be considerable excitement about the future of the space sector. Whether it’s reaching a trillion-dollar market value, improving climate science, or simply making space more accessible and inclusive, the anticipated scientific, economic, and military benefits of space innovation appear promising. But moving the industry from where it is today, valued at approximately $469 billion, and driven largely by familiar satellite services,2 to one capable of reaching the lofty goals mentioned above requires developing entirely new space markets that can provide new ways of exploring and exploiting space sustainably.
Advancing these new markets requires overcoming business barriers that tend to frustrate space-industry growth. Among them is the familiar chicken-or-egg market paradox, where supply and demand of new space services are simultaneously at odds yet dependent on each other.
Developing the automobile market required building gas stations, but to justify building gas stations there had to be enough demand from cars already on the road. Scaling new markets often also requires industry standards, such as the type of fuel gas stations should carry, but establishing a practice as an industry standard often requires sufficient adoption from consumers. In both instances, it’s a chicken-or-egg supply versus demand market dilemma where the development of one market was dependent on another. Indeed, developing new markets often requires addressing this supply versus demand paradox.3 The space sector is experiencing it now.
Innovations in familiar space activities, such as launch and satellite design, are lowering important space sector barriers—for example, some research and development costs. With certain barriers lower, it’s often possible to explore developing new markets based on new activities, such as in-space servicing, inspection, manufacturing, and tourism. But scaling any one of these new activities to establish a commercially viable market likely requires navigating supply versus demand trade-offs, just like the automobile and gas station market example.
For instance, because satellite servicing is not yet routine, there is often little incentive for companies to invest in common satellite interfaces and modular designs that would allow their satellites to be serviced more easily. Yet, until satellites are designed with such features, companies looking to develop the satellite-servicing sector will likely have a harder time finding clients and making satellite servicing routine.
These supply versus demand dilemmas are common in many emerging space markets, including ISAM, STM, novel satellite communications, and in-space resource utilization. Indeed, the existing industry architecture isn’t suited to accommodate many of the new markets spurred by recent innovation.
Even when the need and potential value of new space activities are clear, without a suitable industry architecture the markets may not be. An industry architecture provides roles and frameworks to guide industry participants along a mutually beneficial path (for more on this, see sidebar, “What is an industry architecture?”).4 Without those things, businesses can struggle to understand how to plug in or how to reduce risk when entering a new market.
An industry architecture describes the participants, roles, and rules that influence interactions and interdependencies within an industry.5
Industry participants (e.g., companies, government)
Roles (e.g., service or product provider, customer, regulator)
Rules (e.g., formal laws, standards, market forces)
That’s because by its nature, an architecture is a unifying or coherent form. A strong architecture organizes and integrates complementary parts such that they reinforce one another. The space sector’s current industry architecture has guided it to this point, but it has struggled to integrate new space activities and needs.
As a result, aside from a few exceptions where large private fortunes were able to mitigate some of the business risks to expedite the development of new services, the biggest changes have come from innovations in proven space markets, including earth observation, or through technology advanced in other sectors, such as the miniaturization of electronic components necessary to advance small satellites.
With new space activities emerging and lofty goals envisioned, the architecture must change. Without an updated industry architecture, reducing transaction costs—like those associated with launch—alone may not spur growth of new activities, even if their perceived market value is high.6 What’s necessary is an updated industry architecture that can align incentives and reduce the business risk imposed by the current supply versus demand dilemma.
Key to a fruitful industry architecture is industry participants knowing their value and role along with regulations and other rules that govern behaviors.7 In other words, developing new space markets won’t happen as easily through disparate siloed technologies and industry participants, but instead through a set of symbiotic activities that encourage a collaborative and trusting business ecosystem.
As the space industry looks to modernize its business architecture, it should do so around a few key space activities, including:
What makes these activities so important to a new space-industry architecture is their collective ability to redefine roles, unlock new value, and advance necessary rules to create a collaborative and trusting business ecosystem. ISAM, STM, and satellite standards should be advanced together. Each offers unique but complementary elements of a strong architecture (figure 2).
But these activities won’t just happen. Instead, they must provide new value to commercial consumers, governments, and the scientific community. When developed together they can do just that.
ISAM involves using satellites and spacecraft to service, assemble, and manufacture things in space. ISAM is often discussed as a set of related services but, as figure 3 shows, each typically requires its own unique activities and technologies. Some ISAM activities have been performed since the Apollo program but primarily in support of government, rather than commercial missions.8 Most commercial ISAM activities are in the proof-of-concept or limited demonstration phase,9 but once mature, they can help create an industry architecture through newly created actor roles and value.
As a testament to ISAM’s importance, the Biden-Harris administration released a National ISAM Strategy and Implementation Plan.10 According to Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the chair of the working group that produced the strategy and implementation plan, ISAM is a key set of capabilities and services necessary for maintaining national leadership in space.11
ISAM can enable a new space-industry architecture by creating new value and roles in a few ways: First, by moving capital-intensive requirements from design, build, and launch phases to operational costs. For instance, due to unique demands of launch and operating in space, spacecraft tend to incur high development costs due to engineering contingencies designed to offer the satellite the best chance of success. As Dr. Bhavya Lal observed, a satellite’s design is often influenced more by the first eight minutes of its life [launch] than the decades of in-orbit service.12 If satellites can be serviced or assembled in space, it’s possible to reduce or remove some costly design and development costs by shifting them to when the spacecraft is operational, and possibly even generating revenue.
The second way ISAM can help space organizations create new value is by improving an operator’s return on investment. In-space servicing can extend the life of a satellite. For example, in 2021, a mission extension–servicing vehicle successfully docked with an aging communication satellite to extend the satellite’s life by almost 30%.13
A third way ISAM can create new value is by sustaining the space environment because space sustainability is business sustainability. The same technologies that can relocate or repair a functioning satellite can fix or remove a satellite before it becomes problematic debris.
To create new value through ISAM, new roles are required for government and industry. In the near term, industry roles could focus more on basic ISAM activities and services, such as remote inspection, relocation, refueling, repair, and replacing of parts. Over the long term, ISAM technologies and services will be essential for more complex activities including in-space resource utilization, creating in-space infrastructure for tourism and manufacturing, and other activities that will eventually be necessary if the space sector is to not just reach the often touted trillion-dollar market value but sustain long-term development far beyond that figure.
STM requires information on where spacecraft are in space and the rules and norms to guide satellite behavior. STM is an essential piece of a modern space-industry architecture because it can improve transparency and trust.
Indeed, the very growth necessary to reach new space sector goals isn’t likely to happen without STM. As Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander, US Space Command, has said, “Now is a time for action ... we are at a tipping point in our utilization of space ... space traffic management needs to be taken to the next level.”14 The space environment may quickly be approaching its limit as-is, let alone with hundreds of thousands of additional satellites and dozens of new activities from space tourism to in-space manufacturing.
Take orbital congestion, for example. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of predicted hazardous close approaches by satellites jumped by 58%, while that number leaped 134% between 2020 and 2022.15 At the same time, collision-avoidance maneuvers conducted by satellites are increasing at an equally troubling rate.16 Yet, there aren’t widely adopted rules sufficient to manage space traffic.
More than preventing collisions, it’s important to manage space traffic to plan missions, manage uncertainty, and promote safe operations. All of these can affect anything, from a company’s bottom line to military activities and even threaten to make Earth orbits unusable.17
Part of expanding industry transparency and trust will likely depend on how new STM roles are developed. Governments will need to create and enforce STM laws and rules (though industry can and should help inform them), while industry will need to support the creation of an inclusive, trusted, and accessible STM common-operating picture. Other government and industry roles are likely to develop as STM is established. For example, satellite-safety inspections or audits could aide in oversight, while new traffic rules could help mature the space insurance sector.
Satellite standards are a key piece of a new space-industry architecture because they can create business linkages across space activities, and business linkages are an important requirement for helping advance space activities such as ISAM and STM. Standards can generate business linkages by acting as a source of shared knowledge, improving market efficiency, and promoting trade—which can all help to reduce business barriers.18 Countless other industries benefit from standards for these reasons.19 Standards currently inform some aspects of satellite design and operation, but satellites still tend to be mostly proprietary, serve unique use cases, and offer little interoperability with other satellites.
The importance of standards becomes clearer when considering the planned growth in operational satellites. There are some 7,200 active satellites in orbit with hundreds of thousands of additional satellites planned for the coming years.20With even a fraction of the planned satellites in orbit, attempting to scale new space activities, like ISAM or STM, without standards may not make business sense.
It would be like attempting to create traffic rules for automobiles without common break lights, turn signals, or road signs. Or attempting to create gas-station and vehicle-service markets for tens of thousands of different makes and models of vehicles, all with different fuels, engine designs, and features. A lack of satellite standards can also affect how sustainable space activities are. After all, if it is too difficult to remove defunct proprietary satellites from orbit now, it’s likely to only grow more complicated with tens of thousands of additional satellites occupying already congested orbits.
Without standards and the business linkages they create, new space services could continue to face familiar challenges of scale and accessibility—a problem the current space industry architecture is ill-suited to solve. Government, industry, and academia will need to work together to advance necessary standards through industry adoption and policy.
ISAM, STM, and satellite standards are important to developing a modern space-industry architecture, but seeing these activities mature requires improving technology, developing complementary policy, and incentivizing cross-industry support.
While most of this work will likely fall on the space industry and related government agencies, it shouldn’t be limited to the space industry. Some necessary ISAM and STM technologies, such as artificial intelligence/machine learning or robotics, aren’t unique to the space industry, nor is the space industry unique in its need for government policy support for growth; other industries can help advance ISAM, STM, and satellite standards by advancing technologies and manufacturing practices—like those mentioned in the model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and digital engineering (DE) deep dive below—that are compatible for space and nonspace applications. Perhaps more persuasively, other industries should contribute because the benefits these activities produce will likely extend across industries, governments, and consumers just as many space activities have for decades.
An increasingly popular way of reducing the time and cost of designing and testing satellites and components is through DE and MBSE. DE and MBSE offer a digital environment with a high level of transparency to design, test, and validate complex systems. From designing standards for ISAM or testing the integrity of a component for debris mitigation, DE and MBSE can offer many of the benefits of being in space without the cost and risk.
Beyond replicating test scenarios, the digital environment can improve collaboration. A satellite standard developed in a digital environment can allow stakeholders to improve the design and track its evolution over time. These benefits can help lower business risk, and many are being employed today.
The benefits of DE and MBSE for the space industry may be clear but aren’t always exploited. A preference for proprietary DE and MBSE interfaces and methods can limit their value by walling off collaboration and access to data necessary to improve simulations and designs. Overcoming this challenge can unlock the potential of DE and MBSE and empower the space ecosystem.
Space activities often require advanced technology. ISAM, STM, and satellite standards are no exception. While there is far more that can be said about important space technology innovation, the gaps below represent key challenges to maturing ISAM, STM, and satellite standards.
For ISAM and STM, standards-related challenges come in the form of common interfaces and data formats that enable interoperability. Standards should account for systems and features that support refueling, electrical, data, and other necessary subsystems. While some are in development from various commercial and nonprofit groups, satellites standards for ISAM and STM will need to mature further.
ISAM activities can require satellite standards and several additional technologies and systems (figure 3). Some of the necessary ISAM technologies are sufficiently advanced, while others are still underdeveloped.21 And not all necessary ISAM technologies—for example, general-purpose robotics—are unique to space. The maturity of ISAM technologies influences which ISAM activities are viable today. Satellite inspection, orbit transfer, and refueling are a few ISAM activities viable today. Closing the remaining technology gaps can unlock additional services necessary to realize the full potential of ISAM.
A key STM technology gap is the accuracy and accessibility of space data for spacecraft and debris in orbit, known as space situational awareness (SSA) data. SSA data limitations can lead to poor response time, confusion over appropriate actions, and a lack of transparency among space operators and activities.22 The network of ground- and space-based sensors that collects SSA data needs to be matured to provide more accurate information. More than just collecting better SSA data, new tools are also necessary to create an SSA catalogue that is accurate, trusted, accessible, and inclusive.
US launch facilities may soon be straining under the exponential growth in launches per year. While it’s a sign of industry progress, it can also pose challenges for industry and government: How can US launch facilities keep up with increasing demand? It may not be just a simple issue of capacity either. Different launch vehicles have ranging requirements, from fuel and infrastructure to safety systems and equipment. The payload’s weight and destination in space are also factors. Scaling operations and managing launch traffic across a diverse and complex launch ecosystem require rethinking the modern launch facility.
A future-focused launch facility—or spaceport—should be private sector–led, built around industry standards, and easy to replicate in different locations. More kinds of launch vehicles and more launch demand will require more places to launch from. But producing more launch facilities is only likely to help if there is some standardization to ensure each launch vehicle can access and safely use any number of launch facilities, such as airplanes use airports. Finally, private sector investment, with support from government for common use infrastructure at government-owned facilities, should lead this charge because the future of space launch is commercial.
With most industries or emerging technologies, policy issues often continuously evolve. Indeed, the nascency of ISAM, STM, and satellite standards has left numerous policy questions unanswered. While the policy conversation is just getting started, there are a few key areas that can have an outsized impact on maturing these activities.
For satellite standards, policy should inform necessary safety and sustainability requirements. Some pressing satellite safety and sustainability policy considerations include debris mitigation and reduction related to satellite design and operation, industry-provided SSA data, and cyber resilience across space segments (i.e., ground, payload, data). Other important policy considerations that should be addressed in the near term include defining norms of behavior for in-space servicing and satellite rendezvous and proximity operations.
Modern space operations depend on cyberspace. Whether it’s communicating with the computers on a launch vehicle, sending or receiving data from satellites, or providing satellite products, such as earth imagery, to customers, it almost all happens via cyberspace. Just like countless more established industries, the more valuable space becomes to companies, governments, and others, the more likely it may be targeted by criminals and other malicious cyber actors who see opportunity in space/cyber relationship—imagine ransomware attacks on commercial or government satellites.
A prosperous space industry should, therefore, be cyber-ready. Being cyber-ready requires balancing cyber protection and cyber resilience. Cyber protection is about making the cost of compromise high to the adversary, while cyber resilience is about cost of compromise being low to the mission.
Norms of behavior and rules of the road for STM constitute another policy opportunity. Industry should have a voice in developing and normalizing STM regulations, but government must establish and enforce them. STM rules and norms involve a dizzying number of considerations from orbital dynamics and technology limitations to verification and enforcement and international cooperation. Still, STM is important for maturing the space sector and therefore deserves attention despite its complexity.
A new space industry architecture is possible through ISAM, STM, and satellite standards but not without addressing technology, policy, and business gaps.
Developing a new space-industry architecture is a natural next step in humanity’s exploration and development of outer space. It’s the business structure combined with new space technologies that offers the most opportunity to take space activities to a new level, along with the inevitable scientific, economic and military benefits that will likely occur as a result. Whether it is industry, academia, or government, it is important that each plays a central role ushering in a new space-industry architecture for a more exciting space future.
NASA, “The Apollo-Soyuz Mission,” March 19, 2010; Benjamin A. Corbin et al., Global trends in on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing (OSAM), IDA, March 2020.
View in ArticleIbid.; Deloitte, The commercialization of low Earth orbit, 2022.
View in ArticleWhite House, In-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing national strategy, accessed March 30, 2023; White House, National in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing implementation plan, accessed March 30, 2023.
View in ArticleJ.C. Liou et al., Stability of the future LEO environment—An IADC comparison study, ESA, accessed March 30, 2023.
View in ArticleISO, Standards and economic growth: ISO members’ research on the impact of standards on their national economies, accessed March 30, 2023.
View in ArticleAmong the approximately 22 critical ISAM technologies identified by one study, only a few have been used in ISAM applications, while the majority are still underdeveloped. For more information on this, see Corbin et al., Global trends in on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing (OSAM).
View in ArticleThe authors would like to thank the many Deloitte subject matter experts and business leaders of Deloitte Space whose input contributed greatly to this article. They would also like to thank the incredible team at Deloitte Insights for their invaluable support, including Rupesh Bhat, Aparna Prusty, and Sofia Sergi.
Cover artwork: Sofia Sergi.
