This book offers a comprehensive overview of current space exploration in terms of geopolitical and commercial aspects. Despite multiple attempts to foster commercial activities in the field of space exploration, for decades the domain largely continued to be funded and led by governments in the form of national and international programmes. However, the situation changed with the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the introduction of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme, which employed an innovative procurement scheme based on competitive, performance-based, fixed-price milestones. The success of this programme marked an important milestone in the evolution of the relationship between government and industry. The growing opportunities for private actors to make more prominent contributions to space exploration also lie in the New Space ecosystem, a sectoral transformation characterised by a substantial increase in private investment and the emergence of commercial efforts to develop disruptive concepts and address new markets.

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Patrizia Caraveo is Research Director at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and works at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica in Milan, where she was Director from 2011 to 2017. She is also Professor at the University of Pavia. She has worked on several international space missions dedicated to particle physics and has received various awards: In 2009, she won the Premio Nazionale Presidente della Repubblica, and in 2007, 2011, and 2012, she shared the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society with her colleagues Swift, Fermi, and Agile. In 2014, she received an Outstanding Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace Europe and was included by Thomson Reuters in the list of highly cited researchers for Space Science. In 2017, she was awarded the title Commendatore dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. In 2021 she won the Enrico Fermi prize awarded by the Società Italiana di Fisica (SIF). Clelia Iacomino is a Research Fellow atSpace Economy Evolution Lab of SDA Bocconi School of Management. Her research activities are focused on management mechanisms and political strategies, public-private partnerships and innovation policies. Prior to her current position, she worked as a Resident Fellow at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) in Vienna, under a fellowship from the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and as a Business Analyst at Thales Alenia Space. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Management & Innovation at the Catholic University of Milan where she is researching the transformative role of the State in the context of the space economy and how innovation policies shape the space innovation ecosystem.