Investigating the impact of technology progress on the future architecture of Japanese space enterprise

Abstract

Historically, the Japanese space development has been performed by the government and the national space agency. However, some key figures of merits of space technology reach a mature enough level and people begin to change their attitude to space technology. In this context, the ecosystem and the stakeholders around JAXA have been changing dramatically and the expectation on JAXA is increasing more and more. In this research, ARIES, a system architecting framework is applied to exploration of the generation of the future desired architecture for JAXA by considering the external and internal landscape, stakeholders, and the current architecture. Also, space technology progress is analyzed as an additional process of the ARIES framework in order to generate a holistic envisioned future. Based on these analysis, the gap between current architecture and future desired architecture is identified and alternative architectures are evaluated with unweighted decision matrix and weighted SWOT matrix. As a result, the future architecture named "3Ps architecture", which has three functions; Platformer, Partner, and Purchaser, is generated. This research provides implementation strategy as well as 3Ps architecture, and the strategy shows that sustainable transformation under limited resources is important for the future space ecosystem in Japan. This analysis provides a desired future architecture of Japanese space agency to maximize the outcomes of the investment from the Japanese government for the next decade. The result of this research can be utilized to create an action plan for the transformation. As a future work, multiple stakeholders can join in this research in order to discuss further and create a more sophisticated strategy and a detailed action plan.