DEVELOPMENT OF A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT MODEL IN LARGE-SCALE INTERNATIONAL SPACE SCIENCE PROJECTS

Large-scale international science projects (LISPs) are those projects where two or more countries formally agree to cooperate toward the achievement of a scientific, research and development, or engineering goal. In general, only projects exceeding $1 billion U.S. are considered LISPs, so sheer size commands attention, and because they are so costly and visible, failure can lead to significant scientific, financial and political consequences. This researched focused on how 7 different critical success factors impacted the level of technical interface knowledge shared among international partners involved in a large-scale international space science project (LISSP) – the International Space Station (ISS), which is currently under assembly and testing at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The research methodology employed documentation review, individual interviews and surveys of experienced engineers and managers from three different countries associated with the ISS. The research methodology was applied to three different cases (retrospectively) involving the processing of flight hardware from the three different international partners. The analysis showed that only 5 out of the 7-factor model played a significant role in the level of knowledge sharing between partners. The developed model provides future international partnerships with critical success factors that they can apply to their specific project / mission teams in order to improve the level of knowledge shared between them.