Agent-Based Economic Modeling of Commercial Transportation Services to the International Space Station

Abstract

NASA has budgeted approximately half-a-billion dollars over the next several years to help two commercial industry teams demonstrate orbital transportation services, with the eventual goal of acquiring such services on a consistent basis for International Space Station (ISS) support after Space Shuttle retirement in 2010. The ultimate question for such space commercialization is the obvious: can firms achieve an acceptable financial return that will sustain their involvement in this market? SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. (SEI) has instituted a development activity to determine a firm’s financial return given factors such as failure and competition. Using the available data on potential ISS end-state (the configuration of the ISS at Space Shuttle retirement) and public data on potential suppliers, SEI has developed an agent-based model of the ISS support market. Agent-based models are higher fidelity simulations that allow better modeling of interactions of companies, their customers, and their competitors. For financial simulations of several firms or customers this may be a valuable complement to traditional spreadsheet-based models. In developing this model, SEI has leveraged knowledge gained through its previously developed agent-based model of the sub-orbital space tourism market. Two case studies are presented in this analysis; both use the same future ISS end-state demand. Each case study has two potential commercial companies compete to support the ISS from 2011 until 2017. The first case study does not include the chance of any vehicle failures, whereas the second case study does take into account failure using estimated probabilities for each company’s vehicles. Public data has been used as a reference for modeling potential commercial service providers to the ISS, and SEI has strived to develop reasonable proxies for firms that are known to be interested in providing such services. The results of this study are not meant to represent the fortunes of any specific company, but to analyze in general whether companies can be financially successful supporting these markets.