SpaceTide Accelerating commercialization of the space industry.

By Masayasu Ishida, Co-founder, President & CEO, SPACETIDE Foundation Director and Global Space Group Lead, A.T. Kearney Member of Japan’s national space policy committee

The APAC region is one of the most promising areas where the commercialisation of the space industry has been accelerated in recent years.

We, SPACETIDE Foundation is a Tokyo-based non-profit organisation that aims to “bring new value to our society, lifestyle, culture, and future through the development of the space industry”. Since our establishment in 2015, we have been expanding our activities in the APAC region. Through this article, we would like you to know more about who we are and what we do.

The space industry has been undergoing a major transformation and now creating new values for the world and society. This transformation has been driven by governmental motivations such as national security, new market entrants such as startups and non-space industries, new applications such as satellite constellations, etc.

However, the space industry is still considered to be a niche industry when compared with other industries: the market size of ICT, automotive, healthcare, for instance, are more than 10x, 15x, and 20x larger, respectively. We strongly believe that the space industry can and should contribute more to the future of humanity.

As mentioned above, we are not just a conference organizer. We define ourselves as an orchestrator creating new trends of commercial space. Taking a neutral position, we have cooperated with a wide range of organizations and individuals, and performed various programs such as organizing the conference, publishing our own space industry report, and providing acceleration program for space entrepreneurs.

We have been connecting all stakeholders in the region from aerospace companies to startups, to investors, to governments, to NPO and academia, and even to non-space companies. The ecosystem is now expanding even beyond the APAC region to America and Europe.

The largest portion of our community consists of newto-space companies such as IT/telecom, transportation, insurance, etc. Utilising this uniqueness, we have strengthened interactions between space companies and non-space companies in terms of business creations, such as formulation of the satellite data market.

As a result of our value proposition, fortunately we have received a lot of strong support from around the world. For fiscal year 2022, we have 18 sponsors from domestic and international companies as well as five governmental organisations and numerous strategic partners in promotion activities.

As mentioned in our main uniqueness "Orchestrator of the Space Industry", we have been conducting various initiatives. The followings are a part of our major activities.

The Space industry in the APAC region is dispersed across countries. In order to accelerate collaboration among a diverse set of stakeholders in the space industry, since 2015, every summer we have organised our own annual conference, SPACETIDE, one of the leading commercial space conferences in the APAC region. The previous conference, SPACETIDE 2022, held in July in Tokyo gathered around 750 participants and 90 speakers from 20 countries to exchange the latest trends of the space industry. We also invited world-leading companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin in past conferences.

More focusing on the APAC region, we have been collaborating with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and co-hosting a workshop since 2019. The workshop is an official program of Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum (APRSAF), which is historically the international annual conference for space agencies in the region. Through this workshop, we try to accelerate discussions and partnership between public sectors and private sectors. The latest workshop was held in Hanoi, Vietnam in November 2022, gathering more than 160 participants from 20 countries with the highest participation ratio from public sectors in the history of APRSAF.

We have been also publishing our own industry report named COMPASS. In the report, we gather all segments of the space industry such as launch to deep space exploration, space tourism, and analyse the latest trend of the segments such as startups and investment, focusing on Japanese domestic as well as APAC market. You can download the report for free from our official website.

Apart from the conferences and the industry report, we just launched our own acceleration program named AXELA last year. We have collaborated in a space business contest named S-Booster, organised by the Cabinet Office of Japan. We have provided follow-up programs for the award winner of S-Booster as well as our own selected startup companies.

If you kindly get interested in our activities, please join our events! The following events are currently planned in 2023.

• Summit for Space Sustainability (in collaboration with Secure World Foundation) : New York, USA. June 13-14, 2023.

• Annual Conference: SPACETIDE 2023, Tokyo, July 4 -6, 2023

• Workshop: Space Industry Workshop – Indonesia, Autumn 2023