Space 2030 - research trends as input for long-term planning
- Paper number
IAC-08.D3.2.6
- Author
Dr. Leopold Summerer, European Space Agency (ESA), The Netherlands
- Coauthor
Ms. Géraldine Naja-Corbin, European Space Agency (ESA), France
- Coauthor
Ms. Maria Johansson, European Space Agency (ESA), The Netherlands
- Year
2008
- Abstract
Space missions have relatively long development and operation times. At the same time, space missions generally need to rely on already space proven technology to keep the overall risk levels for failure acceptably low. New technologies are therefore first introduced in science missions, experimental and technology demonstration programmes before entering commercial spacecraft, leading to a "technology delay" of space hardware, directly proportional to the rate of technological change. While attempts are made to increase the opportunities to space-qualify technologies and to substantially shorten the development phases of space missions, it seems that these improvements are outperformed by the rate of technological change, especially for space applications competing with alternative terrestrial solutions in strongly innovation-driven markets (e.g. telecommunication). While some areas of space technology continue to be state of the art, in other areas space seems to be gradually loosing terrain. At the same time, space and space applications are loosing the exceptional status enjoyed since the early days of space activities. It is therefore of increasing importance for long term planning of space activities to try to understand the general environment space missions will be operating in, to identify technology trends and their direct and indirect impact on space activities. Within ESA, the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) is operating as an internal think-tank, performing research on advanced concepts and technologies that are too immature to be considered for regular programmes. As part of its work and based on the assumption that the conceptual and technological changes of tomorrow are already detectable within the ongoing research at universities and research centres, the ACT tries to derive research trends and major development paths in order to inject them as input for long-term strategies. The present paper presents some selected results in this field, obtained in part internally and in part via the academic research network.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-08.D3.2.6.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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