DEVELOPING NEW COMMERCIAL SPACE STATIONS: WHAT IS THE USERS EXPECTED VALUE?

In 2021, NASA established the Commercial LEO Development Program to encourage established and new private-sector actors to design commercial space stations (CSS) that could replace the ISS. The response has been enthusiastic, and hopes are high that CSS will be powerful platforms for expanding the New Space Economy. But for these hopes to be realized, CSS should not only cover their costs, but generate attractive returns on investment and deliver sufficient value to potential users, such as pharmaceutical, energy, and manufacturing companies. Our research answers, "What value do users expect from leveraging CSS for developing their businesses?” We adopted an explorative research approach and sensemake our results with the Value Theory. We first revised 117 peer-reviewed articles and reports on ISS and CSS. We interviewed 14 senior managers of asset and service providers in the Space Station project ecology. We identified 50 primary value propositions (e.g., molecular biology), and we linked the value propositions with 71 potential user customer bases (e.g., pharmaceutical companies). Second, we performed semantic web scraping of 46, 319 established potential users' websites and public documents to extract further information on their value expected in leveraging CSS for developing their business. For example, pharmaceutical companies may find tactical value in developing vaccines in microgravity to improve their processes on Earth and find strategic value in becoming vaccine service providers on the CSS. In the end, we performed a thematic analysis on 146 websites resulting in the scope of the research. Third, we interviewed 6 user managers to deepen and triangulate secondary data and assess the current degree of alignment between their expected value and CSS providers value espoused. Our research endows CSS providers with established users' perspectives, helping them develop compelling value propositions by highlighting short- and long-term opportunities and challenges. Our findings offer CSS providers a clear and specific picture of the established user needs, who are looking for integrated as-a-service platforms and tight cost control. We highlight the key role of intermediaries, acting as translators and facilitators between CSS providers and established potential users to favor a CSS user market growth. CSS users benefit from this study's insights on potential CSS value propositions and possible future applications of CSS in their business.