During the 1960s, space flight had become synonymous with regular technological breakthroughs as well as sheer limitless capabilities in organization and management. NASA, especially after succeeding with the first manned Lunar landing, became the symbol for a government agency that simply could do everything.

Over the years, this positive image of "government in space" has changed for the worse and government space programs have become the object of increasing public criticism. The public space sector today has the following problems:

• Dynamic change took place since the end of the 1980s ("Cold War" ended).

• Ambitious space policies and plans (Europe's autonomy in space , Space Exploration Initiative, ) could not be sustained, had to be re-assessed or withdrawn.

• Large projects from the 1980s had to be cancelled (NASP, Buran, Hermes, Columbus, MTFF, ).

• The high hopes for an "arms conversion bonus" for the space sector did not come true.

• Criticism exists that space programs do not address the real problems of society, for instance, the global crisis.

• After many large corporations demonstrated what can be achieved with "lean production" and "lean management", the public begins to ask for a "lean government".

Although some positive trends are visible as well, the factors given above seem to be certain signs of impending crisis. And: society is less willing than ever to accept this crisis as simply God-given. It rather sees it as a product of bad planning.

The classic strategic planning process as it had been applied in the public space sector for decades was focused on deliberate strategies. This meant that a strategy (i.e., a pattern of objectives and the respective measures for achieving them) was formulated in detail before implementing it.

Typically, the strategy was formulated in the form of a program with finely tuned components (i.e., projects) that were later to be implemented over time in a particular sequence while being supplied with a steady stream of resources (money, personnel, etc). This "hot house approach" (see Figure 1) is well documented, at least in the Western space nations, and has been used since the early days of space flight. Over the years, many different plans and blueprints for future space programs have been published and communicated.

The main characteristics of the underlying strategic planning approach have been:

• Historical orientation towards deliberate strategies

• Focusing on content, not processes

• Aiming for a precise, waterproof plan for measures in form of a program

• Static: Sensitive to change in the planning environment

• Modifications are problematic

• Demand for "planning security"

The deficits of the classic strategic planning approach "first formulate your strategy, than implement it" can be summed up quite briefly: the self-imposed restriction of strategy formation to deliberate strategies excludes learning processes after the strategy's formulation and during its implementation.

Planning and "real action" are artificially separated. Strategy formulation generally takes place at high levels of management, far removed from the details of running an organization on a daily basis.

In the "hot house approach", the active learning cycle of "planning, doing, checking, and reacting" is suspended. The emergence of new strategies in response to an evolving situation in a dynamic world cannot take place.

This inherent weakness of existing space organizations can be told by the fact that most space plans and blueprints could not be implemented as intended!

In recent years there has been an increasing perception of deficits and insufficiencies in the classic way of planning government space programs. NASA, for instance, has occasionally published its intentions of re-inventing itself. This goes together with a strategic reorientation and a new focus on satisfying the needs of all the different stakeholders (public, industry, science community, etc) in the government space program.

Taking this into account, one might ask why government agencies have not yet accepted and employed some of the concepts and approaches that have become known in connection with "learning organizations". For instance, the "process strategy" (see Figure 1).

If one applies the concept of organizational learning to space agencies, one can assume the following type of a learning space organization:

• Learning Goal:

  To survive in a dynamic environment

• Learning Stimulus:

  Confusing state of affairs in the relationship organization environment (misunderstanding, disapproval, performance gaps, )

• Learning Mechanism:

  Acceptance of new strategic assumptions based on strategic reorientation and monitoring of the decision environment

• Learning Result:

  Adaptation; balance between the organization and its dynamic environment

If one applies these characteristics to the US space agency, one may conclude that NASA's strategic reorientation was the result of a learning process. But: without its other part, namely the monitoring of the decision environment, the learning mechanism as defined above is incomplete.

Therefore, in order to respond appropriately to its dynamic environment, a space agency needs a process that "scans the horizon", detects new trends and/or problems and makes them accessible for subsequent decision-making. What could such a process look like?

An alternative strategy process for the planning of government space programs should avoid the pitfalls of the "business as usual", including:

• Failure of showing the connection between perceived problems and the intended measures for their solution; instead, the process should make underlying assumptions (e.g., which project benefits which problem's solution?) highly visible.

• Failure to take into account developments in a dynamic environment; instead, the process should continually track influence factors.

• Failure to implement plans as intended; instead of defining one big solution/decision (i.e., program), the process should break it down into many small partial solutions/decisions (i.e., projects or measures).

Starting in the early 1990s, a respective process (Figure 2) had been developed at the Technical University of Berlin ( TUB) as part of a research project. First findings were published as a doctoral thesis by the TUB's aerospace institute in 1997.

The process in its present state of development is comprised of six different process steps.

Step 1: Establish Ability to Work

The organization (planning team) is assembled and provided with all required resources (personnel, know-how, time, ). The individual roles and the planning task have to be clarified and accepted.

Step 2: Analyze Problem Area

The problem area is the field in which the subsequently proposed projects will have to demonstrate their individual problem-solving potential. All problems have to be quantified ("only the quantified can be improved") in order to lay the ground for later evaluation of the different measures.

Step 3: Develop Solution Alternatives

This is the single most creative step of the whole process. Different project proposals are generated while applying appropriate creativity tools and techniques.

Step 4: Evaluate Solution Alternatives

The previously defined alternative projects are assessed with respect to their potential contribution to solving the quantified problems. In addition, affordability and desirability (synergies, acceptance) are analyzed and quantified for every single proposed project.

Step 5: Set Planning Priorities

The result of this step is a shortlist of preferable projects sorted by their relative planning priority. This is an index composed of the projects' adjusted efficiency, their planning synergy and their planning urgency.

Step 6: Determine Next Steps

Based on the shortlist of preferable projects, the decision on the next steps is made.

The respective flow chart is depicted below (Figure 3).

Testing the newly designed process required its application to a dedicated planning task. Researchers briefly considered implementing the process at a space agency. However, pragmatic reasons constrained its testing within a case study.

The case study thus planned a global space program for a hypothetical "World Space Agency". The respective scenario had the following key features:

• Founding of a global "office for space planning"

• Mission: global coordination of government space projects

• Personnel: 100 space planning experts world-wide plus administrative overhead

• Time frame: 6 months to apply and thoroughly test the aforementioned process

The planning task was described as follows:

"It is required to identify all global problems that might have to be taken into account by government space planning within a time horizon up to the year 2100. Based on a quantitative evaluation of the different problem relevance, potential solutions (i.e., space projects) have to be defined and assessed with respect to their individual planning priorities."

Starting with a search for space-related global problems, 34 different such problems could be identified (see Appendix 1). All these problems have been assessed with respect to their individual importance, their impact on society, and their potential of being solved by space projects. The respective result the problem's relative relevance for space is a value between 0 and 100%.

This process step delivered four A-problems:

• Excess of threats by weapons of mass destruction (25.7% of relative relevance)

• Lack of non-regenerative energy supplies (20.7%)

• Lack of regenerative energy supplies (15.2%)

• Lack of free access to unfiltered information (12.0%)

"A-problem" here means that these four problems put together already constitute half of the total problematique (i.e., sum of the relative relevance) of all the 34 problems.

All the assessed problems have to do with the excess or lack of material, energy, information, or people. In order to derive space projects later on, it is practical to define transportation tasks first. As it is shown below (Figure 4), space technology is able to handle a wide variety of these.

Based on these tasks, the planners are able to define appropriate space projects that address all of the aforementioned global problems.

In the next (very creative) step, the potential space projects have to be defined. All in all, 22 different projects were found and briefly specified during the case study (see Appendix 2).

Since not all of these can be carried out in parallel, those projects that promise a good mix of efficiency, affordability, and desirability (synergies, acceptance) have to be filtered out. The case study's "Top Five" in terms of adjusted efficiency have been the following projects: