Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now.

Rapidly falling launch costs and fleets of new satellites are opening up big opportunities for business. by Matthew Weinzierl, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Alan MacCormack and Brendan Rosseau

From the Magazine (November–December 2022)

Antennae of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. European Southern Observatory/Christoph Malin (christophmalin.com)

Summary.

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In the early 2000s, as the U.S. space shuttle program was winding down, the government’s policy on space moved away from its model of flowing all money and decisions through NASA and the Department of Defense. Instead, it began to allow privately funded companies to compete for public-sector contracts. The Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (commonly known as COTS) and its successors, for example, gave private companies fixed-price contracts, rather than the cost-plus contracts typically used in the space sector, to provide services to resupply the International Space Station.

Read more on Analytics and data science or related topics Collaboration and teams, Innovation, Start-ups, Strategy, Aerospace sector, Space industry, Travel and tourism industry and Space vehicles

A version of this article appeared in the November–December 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Matthew Weinzierl is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His teaching and research focus on the design of economic policy and the economics and business of space.

Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury is Lumry Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School and Associate Editor at Management Science. He studies the Future of Work and is a Forbes Future of Work-50 and TIME-Charter Future of Work-30 awardee.

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, the director of Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, and the author of Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries (Berrett-Koehler, 2018).

Alan MacCormack is the MBA Class of 1949 Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is an expert in the management of innovation and new product development and a core faculty member in the MS/MBA joint degree program with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Brendan Rosseau is a research associate and teaching fellow at Harvard Business School.

Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now.

Summary.

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