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When we talk about Space, our interlocutors think about planets, stars, asteroids, astronauts and, sometimes satellites. But, only a small percentage is aware of what satellite technology can do and the relevance of satellite applications in our everyday life. From satellite communication, to navigation and to earth imagery, satellites data and technology are contributing in improving our daily life, or businesses or helping the management of our cities. Often, the end users come across an obstacle in communicating their needs to the service providers. On the other side, the service providers themselves are not fully aware how to communicate with the end-users. In some cases, this lack of communication makes difficult to meet the demand of space applications from the user side with the supply from the service providers. Eurisy, an association of space agencies established thirty years ago, works to put the end users at the core of the space value chain. In this last decades, Eurisy has been attentive and responsive to the changes of the space sector trying to picture how end users are becoming familiar with space technology. In particular, how the democratisation of space is turning space, especially satellite technology, into an enabler to guarantee the development of a sustainable living, accessible to everyone. Eurisy recently started a review of the case studies collected over the last ten years thanks to direct testimonials, event and conferences, publications and surveys. The user-centred approach adopted is innovative in the space sector and over the years proved to be effective in connecting users and service providers in different contexts. The paper aims at: 1- Identifying challenges and barriers that characterise the relations between service and/or information providers and end users. 2- Analysing the changes occurred in the relations between end users and service providers from 2007 to date in Europe. 3- Presenting the reasons that motivates the use of satellite data and technologies and which of these is the most used. 4- Presenting Eurisy's approach as an applicable model outside the European borders and the benefits deriving from connecting space and society. Furthermore, the paper will briefly present the ongoing activities as examples of the work put in place by the organisation and how the user-centred approach is applied. • The so-called democratisation of space has consequences on the downstream sector. • End users are mostly local and regional public authorities. • Central Europe seems to be the most fertile area where to find use cases. • The main technology adopted is Satellite Navigation. SatComs are not common. • Eurisy works putting the end-users central in the space value chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]