Emerging Space: Practitioners’ Reflections on Building New Space Ecosystems Around the World

The space sector is attracting more and more businesses from an ever-increasing number of regions and countries, rather new to the network of well-established partnerships. The emerging space ecosystem can be defined as a region or country that is relatively newer to a comprehensive space ecosystem buildup, yet significantly increases its efforts in this domain. Due to the dynamically changing nature of the global space economy, emerging space ecosystems can find themselves needing to use a novel approach distinctive from the one they would prefer in the past. This shift allows these regions to flexibly adapt their ecosystems to the current needs and developments of the global space economy to maximize efficiency in industrial capacity building. The purpose of this article is to share the experience gathered over the past 3 years by the Slovak Space Office with its emerging space initiative. This initiative is providing international partners a unique opportunity to discuss and learn from business and institutional representatives about the most efficient mechanisms for space ecosystem creation and its integration into established value chain networks. The international spin-offs and side events of emerging space were an official part of various prestigious international platforms including United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, International Astronautical Congress, or World Expo. Thus, this article focuses on exploring what are the current capacity-building mechanisms, strategies, or objectives in-and-for the emerging space regions.