When Policy Structures Technology: Balancing upfront decomposition and in-process coordination in Europe׳s decentralized space technology ecosystem

• Science requirements increasing beyond the capabilities of single PI institutions.
• Imposed ESA policy negatively affects space science instrument development.
• Paper applies loose and tight coupling concept to both org and tech structures.
• Detailed longitudinal case study demonstrates the need for matched coupling.
• Strategies proposed to achieve coupling within European space science context.

This paper examines the decentralization of European space technology research and development through the joint lenses of policy, systems architecture, and innovation contexts. It uses a detailed longitudinal case history of the development of a novel astrophysics instrument to explore the link between policy-imposed institutional decomposition and the architecture of the technical system. The analysis focuses on five instances of collaborative design decision-making and finds that matching between the technical and institutional architectures is a predictor of project success, consistent with the mirroring hypothesis in extant literature. Examined over time, the instances reveal stability in the loosely coupled nature of institutional arrangements and a trend towards more integral, or tightly coupled, technical systems. The stability of the institutional arrangements is explained as an artifact of the European Hultqvist policy and the trend towards integral technical systems is related to the increasing complexity of modern space systems. If these trends persist, the scale of the mismatch will continue to grow. As a first step towards mitigating this challenge, the paper develops a framework for balancing upfront decomposition and in-process coordination in collaborative development projects. The astrophysics instrument case history is used to illustrate how collaborations should be defined for a given inherent system complexity.