When companies began approaching NASA’s Langley Research Center, asking to be included in the In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) State of Play for access to competitive intelligence, the team knew they had crossed an inflection point.
“We’ve had some unnamed companies ask if we have any proprietary information,” says Dale Arney, senior team lead for the ISAM Technology Portfolio at NASA Langley. The answer is “no,” but that impartiality is precisely what makes the State of Play invaluable to an industry trying to understand a rapidly expanding field.
Published since 2021, the 2026 edition has grown to 368 pages documenting current ISAM capabilities across 11 functional areas, from robotic manipulation to refueling and structural assembly. The document serves as both encyclopedia and roadmap for the technologies that will enable spacecraft to be serviced, assembled, and manufactured in orbit rather than launched as integrated systems.
“The field itself has expanded more than linearly since we started,” Arney explains. What began as a tool to ensure NASA centers shared a common reference point has become the industry’s go-to resource for understanding what’s possible versus what’s still conceptual.
The State of Play team maintains strict entry criteria: hardware must physically exist, either as ground prototypes or in-flight demonstrations. “We get people who will send their PowerPoint presentation of their technology idea,” Arney notes. “There’s no real indication they’ve done any work on the technology itself yet.” Those concepts don’t make the cut until the following year’s review.
This rigor matters, because ISAM capabilities will enable missions impossible with traditional single-launch approaches. Future missions will require telescopes larger than any launch vehicle fairing, persistent national security assets that are mobile and resilient, and commercial systems that can upgrade to the latest technology on orbit without full replacement.
The document is intentionally collaborative. “We like to refer to it as kind of a crowdsource document,” says team member John Mulvaney. Each year brings more interviews with industry partners to ensure accuracy and completeness. Contributions come from NASA centers including Ames, Glenn, Marshall, Kennedy, and Johnson, along with international developers meeting the hardware criteria.
The result is more than a technical reference. The 2026 edition includes developer profiles and facilities documentation, providing mission designers with not just what’s possible but who’s doing it and where the work happens. For companies entering the ISAM ecosystem or expanding their capabilities, it offers both competitive context and collaboration opportunities.
As the space industry moves toward more ambitious missions, from lunar infrastructure to on-orbit manufacturing, the ISAM State of Play provides the shared vocabulary and capability baseline that emerging ecosystems require. It’s not speculation about the future; it’s documentation of what exists now and where the hardware is heading next.
The 2026 ISAM State of Play is available for download at NASA.gov
Source: NASA