Competitiveness Segment
The competitiveness segment of the Space Safety Programme is intended to broaden the scope of space safety in commercial markets, by speeding up the process by which innovative ideas go from technologies to products and services. ESA will act as a trial user and early adopter of the space safety industry’s products and services, thus reducing the risk to businesses. Another objective is to close the gap between Europe and the USA in space safety commercial markets. The segment will complement similar initiatives in other programmes and will be industry-driven, subject to a co-funding scheme and explicit support by relevant Member States, with a fast-track procurement process to shorten the time to market.
The Competitiveness segment will be implemented across the following lines:
* It will be industry driven: it will be implemented through a permanently open call for proposal referred to as Announcement of Opportunity (AO). The AO will be issued and updated inviting economic operators to submit proposals at any time within the scope of the S2P programme, i.e. the selected activities will not be part of the ESA-defined S2P work plan.
* The AO will set out the requirements to be met by economic operators together with guidelines and templates for preparing outline proposals and the ensuing full proposals.
* Economic operators may include, e.g. Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs), midcaps, large enterprises, universities and research institutions.
* Proposals will be continuously evaluated and selected in a two-stage process: First with an outline proposal and thereafter, based on a successful selection, with the submission of a full proposal. This process shall be light-weight to optimise to the maximum the proposal-writing effort for the economic operator and the evaluation effort for the Agency. Appropriate technology maturity and closeness to market will be key selection factors. For this purpose, a minimum start TRL of 6 will be required, although a lower TRL could be accepted in specific cases where lower maturity is considered sufficient (in any case a minimum TRL of 4 should be required). ESA shall not be the only prospective customer for the envisaged product/service, although ESA’s role as anchor customer will be encouraged.
* Co-funding will be required, i.e. the activity will be funded by the Agency up to a maximum fraction of the total costs of an activity implemented under a given contract, with the specific scheme to be defined in the Implementing Rules.
* Support by the participating States of the economic operators participating in the industrial consortium will be required, specifying a ceiling budget for that support. This way the consistency with national space safety policies will be ensured and access to the programme funding will not compete with activities in the work plan. Evidence of this support must be provided already with the outline proposal.
* Based on a positive Agency’s assessment of the outline proposal, the economic operator will be invited to submit the full proposal for evaluation. The ESA co-funding in this invitation could be lower than or equal to the ceiling budget initially supported by the participating States, consistent with the proposal’s technical and financial assessment.
* The complete selection and procurement process should last less than 3-4 months not to miss market opportunities. To this end, budget thresholds will be defined to streamline the decision process at ESA’s procurement committees, and fast track procurement practices will be used to the maximum extent (e.g. EXPRO and EXPRO+).
* The respective responsibilities and rights of ESA and the economic operator will be defined in legal instruments, in particular in the form of contracts. Economic operators co-fund their proposals and are responsible for their delivery according to the ESA contract and retain all hardware and software deliverables and intellectual property by default.
* ESA will regularly report the number of submissions received, the origin of these proposals, the type, domain and general objective of the proposal etc.
* ESA’s role in mitigating the technology and management risks in the delivery (e.g. anchor customer, forward buying, demonstration on ESA’s operations infrastructure).
