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“New Space" is reshaping the economic landscape of the space industry and has far-reaching implications for technological innovation, business models, and market dynamics. This change, aligned with the digitalization in the world economy, has given rise to innovations in the downstream space segment. This “servitization” of the space industry, essentially, has led to the transition from selling products like satellites or spacecraft, to selling the services these products provide. This also connects to applications of various technologies, like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and virtualization. Redefining Space Commerce: The Move Toward Servitization discusses the advantages of this shift (e.g., cost reduction, increased access to space for smaller organizations and countries), as well as the challenges, such as maintaining safety and security, establishing standardization and regulation, and managing risks.

With technological breakthroughs in electric land vehicles revolutionizing their respective industry, maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) facilities in aviation are also adopting digital technologies in their practices. But despite this drive towards digitalization, the industry is still dominated by manual labor and subjective assessments. Today, several technologies, processes, and practices are being championed to resolve some of these outstanding challenges. Considering this, it is important to present current perspectives regarding where the technology stands today and how we can evaluate capabilities for autonomous decision support systems that prescribe maintenance activities. Overlooking some of these unsettled domain issues can potentially undermine any benefits in speed, process, and resilience promised by such systems.

Today, we are all strongly dependent on the correct functioning of technical systems. They fail, and we become vulnerable. Disruptions due to degradation or anomalous behavior can negatively impact safety, operations, and brand name, reducing the profitability of all elements of the value chain. This can be tolerated if the link between cause and effect is understood and remedied. Anomalous behavior, which indicates systems or subsystems not acting in accordance with design intent, is a much more serious problem. It includes unwanted system responses and faults whose root cause can’t be properly diagnosed, leading to costly, and sometimes unnecessary, component replacements. The title No Fault Found: The Search for the Root Cause was developed to propose solutions to this technical and business challenge, which has become less and less acceptable to the commercial aviation industry globally.