National Space Symposium without NASA: An oppoprtunity to develop and strengthen relationships

NASA’s reaction to the impacts of sequestration made headlines recently when Charles Bolden announced that his Agency was pulling out of the 29^th National Space Symposium, taking place in Colorado Springs April 8-11.  NASA  isn’t the only USG agency that’s decided not to attend – there will be a reduced presence from many DoD offices, too – but the NASA announcement is the one that many people have latched onto.

NSS is the acknowledged annual forum for the global space community, and a key opportunity for exhibitors and participants to meet with customers and industrial partners.

However, rather than viewing this as a negative, let’s view this from another perspective: will we look back on 2013 as the year that commercial space companies started to gain the upper hand against the traditional institutions?

The vacuum created by NASA’s absence will be filled over time by the more enlightened and entrepreneurial sectors of the industry, who recognize that the “problems” of delivering and maintaining space assets and ground infrastructure and getting data and information to end users are not going to go away, and that the solutions lie in developing efficient and collaborative relationships with other complementary firms that each excel in their core business areas.

So, while some of your key customers might not be there for you to talk to, there are still government-driven missions out there that need to go through the acquisition process – albeit fewer of them, with smaller budgets -  as well as more agile commercial firms looking to exploit market niches, each increasingly reliant on synergies across the value chain from financing and insurance, through to spacecraft and launch vehicle manufacturers, to make their business cases work.

So take advantage of the free slots in your NSS meeting schedules to spend more time talking with prospective partners, to plan how to combine your competitive strengths to provide winning solutions to your customers within this new budget-strapped paradigm.

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