Commercial vs Institutional Space Procurement: Challenges & Opportunities

The ongoing revolution in the space market, where an increasing number of new commercial players are encouraged by easier and cheaper access to space, set important challenges to Large System Integrators (LSI)—likewise OHB System—in different areas of their usual business. In particular, we address in this article how the Supply Chain reacts.

Splitting the Supply Chain organisation into two dedicated streams addressing the standard institutional market and the new commercial market is not an efficient option. The structured procurement practices determined by the Best Practices requested by the European Space Agency procurement regulations are still the guiding light of the Supply Chain organisation.

Their well run-in procedures, all the tools needed to administrate RFI/RFP/ITT campaign in fair competition, to execute subcontracts, and to track and monitor Suppliers Performances, are specifically effective for space missions characterised by a high level of technological development. These missions need to mitigate the resulting risks via severe qualification campaign, which normally drive schedule and costs well aware to any Company used to prototyping.

Such philosophy, with the relevant tools, needs to be tuned to cope with reduced budget and more demanding time-to-market.

An important step has been made in the last years enabling the submission of Full Consortium Offers, which in principle reduces the time-to-contract, as the Industrial Consortium that will deliver the Spacecraft can be defined in advance, in order to comply with geographical return ranges set by the Agency in the RFP.

Another fundamental step has also been taken by the Agency Engineers and PA, in the acceptance of new quality standards for EEE parts intended to be used within missions with an operative life of 5 years, working in orbits less harmed by cosmic radiations. No need to highlight the positive impacts such an approach brought to costs and specially to lead times.

To face timings and budgets of the new commercial space market, the Supply Chain has to adopt quicker decision-making methods. Provision of standardised RFP Data Packages is mandatory, but is eased by an environment not anymore keen on developing new technologies, but rather to “upgrade” commercial/aerospace hardware (with the relevant stunning performances) to space standards.

Selection of Off-the-Shelf items is more frequent, which means optimised stock management and procurement at the equipment level, and a contract execution via simple Purchase Order.

On the AIT side, reduced test campaign, or pre-testing of specific items, needs to be considered to reduce the overall schedule.

All in all, the commercial trend generates challenges to spacecraft engineers. The search for the perfect performance at the individual subsystem level gives way to a more aggregate design concept more focused on the aggregation of existing building blocks. From a procurement standpoint, it is not a big change with respect to the procurement, e.g., of an optical or telecom payload, but from an engineering point of view, it is an evolution similar to the one occurred from procedural programming (Basic, Pascal, C) to the object-oriented programming (C++, Java, Python).

Large System Integrators cannot compete in the same field with small platform manufacturers, their cost structure does not allow it. It is not a case that all LSI have specific divisions or subsidiaries (existing or recently acquired) dedicated to this business. The different subsystems domain have to be aggregated into a more collegial manner towards a pragmatic but quick solution at mission level, trading mission performances with time-to-market and overall costs.

“Lsis Need To Change Skin And Propose To Their Customers New Business Models Based On End-Toend Services And Develop Or Acquire, Where Missing, The Relevant Knowhow To Do So”

New program management (i.e., scrum) methodology needs to be implemented as well, and Procurement Pundits are delighted to actively contribute scouting new and highly motivated commercial space suppliers.

The technical challenges implied by this trend also determine the opportunity for Large System Integrators to evolve their nature to adapt to the new climate. That means that LSI cannot take care on the spacecraft delivery only, but need to cover all the segments that bring value to Customers less interested into the system technical features, but rather more to the delivered data. For this reason, LSIs need to change skin and propose to their Customers new business models based on end-to-end services and develop or acquire, where missing, the relevant know-how to do so.

Specific mention needs to be made concerning the European typical aggregated funding scheme of space missions, based on each contributing nation geographical return: concerning institutional missions, this requirement is still to be observed. However, given the recent introduction of Class-F (Fast) missions, characterised by reduced delivery time and budget available, participation of relatively young suppliers located in the so-called “New ESA Member States”, creates favourable conditions to develop a sparkling competitive environment. On the other side, on a pure commercial mission, the geo-return requirement does not apply, so that the competition can be extended worldwide.