Qualitative Evaluation Of Long-Term Space Projects On The Example Of The LOP-G Mission

Abstract

In public and governmentally funded space agencies such as NASA, some projects and missions are cancelled due to various reasons. These cancellations have a negative effect on both workforce and the agency itself (Cappels, 2004). It appears that some of these cancellations can be related to political decisions (Forbes, 2017; Wall, 2018; Malik, 2010) and others to financial reasons (ESA, 2019; Wade, 2019). NASA in partnership with other space agencies proposed a follow-up to the International Space Station called “Lunar-Orbital Platform-Gateway” (LOP-G), a space station orbiting the Moon (Ching, et al., 2017). This mission has estimated costs of $135 billion (Falk, 2018) and will include partnerships with private industry (Webb, 2019). Due to the complexity and financial volume of this mission, the causes that resulted in a cancellation of former projects are analysed, enabling a more precise risk assessment of exceptionally long-term space projects. It is shown that the main risks that cause cancellations to happen can be quantified and categorised into political risks, financial risks and partner risks. About 78% of cancellations are related to political influences and about 22% are related to financial issues. As the LOP-G mission includes contribution of partners, qualitative and quantitative data to express a risk rate for partner risks are analysed with the result of a 0% risk ratio. These results demonstrate that the main qualitative risk of the analysed agencies (NASA, CNES and ESA) is related to political decisions and that the risk assessment process of space agencies should further analyse these risks to minimise the probability of a cancellation to happen or at least reduce the impact of a cancellation. This research study can be used as basis for future risk and project assessment processes of space agencies by providing a quantitative risk framework that can be aligned to existing assessment processes of these agencies. In addition, recommendations about lowering the negative impact of cancellations are provided and advice on how to further analyse the findings of this work to generate a more precise analysis of the identified risks is given.