Space Tourism Industry Emergence: Description and Data

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This report has 2 goals. The first is to narrate the origins of the space tourism industry using 2 models of industry evolution. The first model, representing the complex and turbulent nature of the innovation process, sequences observed events into a narrative of industry emergence. The second model, listing the industry resources required for successful emergence, referred to as industry infrastructure elements (IIEs), helps identify the relevant industry events from a larger number of component incidents. This research collected more than 8,400 pieces of secondary and archival data from traditional and news aggregator websites, distilled them into ∼400 significant events, and categorized them within the 3 main components of IIEs: Institutional Arrangements, Resource Endowments, and Proprietary Functions. Primary data, collected via 40 interviews of industry members, complemented the secondary data. Organizing the events within these models results in a rich description of the space tourism industry emergence phenomenon. The second goal of this report is to contribute to industry emergence research conducted by others. The data collection methodology in this research followed that of the Minnesota Innovation Research Project, which allows for the collectivization, and sharing, of data sets among multiple innovation researchers, based on a common definition of the innovation process. Therefore, in support of the goal of collectivist data collection, the Supplementary Appendix of this report contains the full data set of space tourism industry emergence events (including citations), for use by like-minded industry emergence researchers.