IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/isichp/978-3-032-10645-2_5.html

Walk Away Decisions: When and How to Strategic Exit from Unprofitable Space Projects

In: Space Economy SEWA - Start, Evolve, or Walk Away

Author

Listed:
  • Luca Giraldi

    (University of Turin, Law Department)

Abstract

This chapter, “When to Walk Away,” examines the underexplored decision to terminate aerospace and space exploration projects. It challenges the romanticised norm of limitless perseverance, advocating for explicit, data-driven exit criteria amid technical, financial, and regulatory uncertainty. Drawing on industry cases, including technological dead ends, loss of funding, regulatory shifts, and strategic misalignment, it outlines practical frameworks for early detection of project inviability. The chapter analyses cognitive and organisational biases, such as sunk-cost fallacy, corporate ego, and groupthink, that impede rational judgement. It offers tools for transparent evaluations, independent reviews, and milestone-gated funding to enforce disciplined decision-making. Termination is reframed as strategic prudence rather than failure, highlighting opportunity costs and the benefits of reallocating resources to higher-potential initiatives. Integrating insights from engineering management, finance, and governance, the chapter provides actionable guidance for entrepreneurs, executives, and investors to institutionalise robust exit processes. By fostering a culture of timely withdrawal, it seeks to strengthen resilience, sustainability, and long-term value creation in the high-risk domain of space ventures.

Suggested Citation

  • Luca Giraldi, 2025. "Walk Away Decisions: When and How to Strategic Exit from Unprofitable Space Projects," International Series in Advanced Management Studies, in: Space Economy SEWA - Start, Evolve, or Walk Away, chapter 5, pages 49-60, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:isichp:978-3-032-10645-2_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-10645-2_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:isichp:978-3-032-10645-2_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.