Disruptive low-cost solutions in the space sector

Clayton Christensen’s model of disruptive technologies demonstrates how new entrants manage to displace established leaders in a sector, sometimes using the very technologies invented by these leaders. In the space sector, the American companies SpaceX and Planet Lab ‘disrupted’ an entire sector which until then had appeared to be impenetrable and largely shielded from competition. Start-ups financed by private investments devise new proposals with technical solutions which are sometimes less efficient than those thought up by NASA, but by offering services they meet a much larger range of needs. France, the so-called ‘mother country’ of space technology in Europe, is not currently involved in this movement. Only one of the five hundred and sixty-eight nanosats (satellites weighing less than 30 kilograms) launched by the end of 2016 was French. How is it possible to devise a new public policy relying on existing bodies which would make spatial activity in France and Europe evolve into a more horizontal model?