This work is submitted in the framework of a tender of the Israel Space Agency for the utilization of space. In the request for a price quote the aim was defined as follows:
“Israel and the other industrialized countries in the world are involved in a lot of space related research activity. For a long time government agencies, especially in the U.S., had to justify budgets for space related activity from an economic point of view. The required work is aimed at examining the economic aspects of space activity in Israel in order, among others, to assist ISA decisions in guiding Israel’s space activity”.
Owing to budgetary limitation for this work it was limited to subjects of platform and cargo launching. Topics of ground equipment, communications and distant sensory were not probed. In spite of these limitations we did occasionally spill over into those areas as they were an inherent part of space activity.
This work related, of course, only to the civilian activity and not to the security related one, even though here too, there must be a certain reference to all the industrialized countries where the defense budget supplied the technological basis, the infrastructure and level of minimal employment needed to maintain such costly scientific-technological systems.
The basis for the requested work was created in the committee that examined space infrastructure in Israel headed by Uzia Galil. In its finding the committee noted the scientific importance of space projects, and since it did not examine the economic aspects of those plans it made do with the following declaration which served us in determining the methodology: “In almost every place where work on space systems is being done the committee found people who believed in their ability to derive commercial benefits from space related assets and activities, but most of them claim that in order to do so they still needed intermediate support for maintaining and advancing infrastructures and technologies in order to arrive at commercial structures”.
