During the last decades, the space sector has gone through many changes; more private actors have joined, the dependence on space assets has increased, and the threat of cyberwarfare and private cyber attacks is growing. With this recent development, one wonders how we can ensure cyber security in such a specific industry. This is a multifaceted matter since there is a need to have technical solutions and to ensure that stakeholders take their responsibility, both of which will be considered in this thesis. Thirteen qualitative interviews with Swedish space stakeholders were conducted to understand the current industry landscape and which aspects should be prioritised for the future. We found that all Swedish actors must begin to cooperate, both state and businesses should contribute to a change in priority and technical experts should have more influence. The results were also applied and evaluated with the Multistakeholder Model. We examined distributed ledger technology and which adjustments were needed to make it applicable to satellites to include a technical aspect. We found that an update of the underlying structure and the choice of Proof of Stake as a consensus method could make distributed ledgers less demanding of computational power and storage.

This study is an empirical case study of the Swedish space- and automation company Unibap AB about how to build trust in the space industry. The space industry is distinctive in the way that space missions are at high stakes because of the high costs and the fact that the technology can not be modified after launch. Reliability and trust are therefore crucial factors of doing business in the space industry. Also, AI-based satellite solutions can bring huge benefits but 60% of the resistance from companies to running AI is linked to lack of trust. The concept of trust has been discussed before in the industrial marketing literature and differentiates between social sources and offer-related sources of trust. However, there appears to be an empirical as well as a theoretical gap when it comes to building trust in the space industry. Because the topic is unexplored, an exploratory methodology is used when interviewing 12 actors in the space- and high-tech industry worldwide. Since one important aspect of offer-related trust seems to be usability, this study also includes a usability evaluation of Unibap's space computer solution SpaceCloud which enables on-board AI applications. Key antecedents of trust in the space industry were found to be transparency, competence, reliability of technology, and exact delivery times. It appears that social- and offer-related trust significantly influence partnerships between companies and that offer-related trust is the most important type of trust to win contracts of tax-funded agencies. Strengths and improvements of the usability of SpaceCloud are also identified, and it is concluded that SpaceCloud has the potential to offer a new way of building satellite applications in the future.

Solar energy is resourceful for many purposes, for example, harvesting renewable electricity with photovoltaic (PV) technology. The number of new grid connections of PV is continuously increasing, and the Swedish PV market for residential prosumers is growing. Providing accurate information about PV’s benefits and the installation’s technical details is essential to attract more prosumers to the PV market. One outlet for such information is providers of PV, who are also responsible for the technical details. From a technical perspective, how much of the produced electricity the prosumer can self-consume impacts the profitability of the investment. Higher self-consumption is associated with more savings, and a battery storage system has the potential to increase self-consumption. Two different approaches were used to carry out this thesis. Communication was studied with a qualitative approach, and the technical term self-consumption was analysed quantitatively. A discourse analysis with a pragmatic approach was performed to study what meanings are created when retailers communicate about the two genres within the discourse of PV: the benefits and the technical specifications. Qualitative data used for this part was collected from the websites of PV retailers. The quantitative part involved calculations of self-consumption levels and simulations of a battery storage system in MATLAB using an extensive data set over households with real PV systems. The identified research gap indicates no previous studies on how PV retailers communicate and few studies of self-consumption using data from real systems. The results from the discourse analysis of the benefits showed that some of the central meanings were: “a prosumer's roof is worth money if they can afford the investment”, “PV has a positive environmental impact”, and “adoption of PV is a trend that prosumers should follow”. The central meaning from the analysis of the technical specifications was that “a prosumer does not need to be concerned about the technical aspect of the installation because the company takes care of it”. The results from the quantitative study showed that from the available data, self-consumption was dependent on how the PV system size is matched to the consumption of the household. Depending on the ALR groups, the households had different mean values of self-consumption, whereas the most common group ALR=6 had a mean self-consumption level of 38%. The simulations with battery storage showed that systems with lower initial self-consumption (below 40%) could increase self-consumption faster with increasing battery capacity but could not reach maximum self-consumption values.