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 realised, 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.
Despite their relevance, the users’ perspective is under-investigated. To this end, our research answers, “How do potential users perceive the value of harnessing CSS in their business?”
We adopted an explorative mixed-method research approach and sensemake our results with the Value Theory. The research consists of four main phases. 1) Identification of the value streams and potential users based on the review of 114 documents. 2) Investigation of the CSS providers value espoused based on the content analysis of secondary data and 14 interviews with CSS providers. 3) Investigation of the CSS potential users value expected through the semantic webscraping of 46,319 CSS users’ websites and public documents triangulated with 6 interviews with CSS user managers. 4) Comparison of the CSS providers value espoused, and potential users value expected.
Overall, we identified and compared 50 CSS value streams from the providers' and users' perspectives and developed an analytical framework to explain them. Our research endows CSS providers with users' value perception and their geographical and sectorial distribution, helping the CSS providers to develop compelling value streams. Our findings offer CSS providers a clear and in-depth overview of the users value expected, who are looking for integrated as-a-service platforms and tight cost control. CSS users benefit from this study's insights on potential CSS value streams and possible future applications of CSS in their business.
