Case study
A commercial spaceflight leader
A space tourism MVP shaped against a segment of fewer than 30,000 people worldwide, saving $500M in aerospace research.
Stated
A commercial spaceflight company set out to design human spaceflight offerings for the affluent space tourism market. The target customer is the centi-millionaire holding $100M or more in investable assets, a global population of fewer than 30,000 people who do not sit on conventional research panels. The company needed causal insight from that segment to design, price, and position the offering.
Revealed
Price was not the lever. Media capacity carried 51% relative importance in the choice model and cost carried 34%, with the strongest preference for 3-day missions. Quality press coverage, not price, drove brand preference. On interplanetary sentiment, ethical and environmental concerns were the largest barrier at 47% importance. On the competitive read, the client was the most preferred brand in its segment, and buyers favored a 400km maximum altitude over lower offerings.
Numbers
Figures with provenance.
$500M
aerospace research cost avoided
51%
relative importance of media capacity in the choice model
30,000
size of the global centi-millionaire segment the study reached
Model-predicted
Stated before the answer was known.
Predicted
Media capacity would carry 51% relative importance in the choice model against 34% for cost, with 3-day missions preferred and a 400km maximum altitude favored over lower offerings.
Client case-study document (Drive, 2026-05-21)
Causality
Media capacity drives the choice more than price does. Because attributes moved independently, the effect is attributable to the attribute rather than inferred from what buyers happened to prefer together.
- Intervention
- Mission attributes varied independently across choice tasks: duration, maximum altitude, onboard media capacity, and price.
- Outcome
- Choice among competing spaceflight offerings.
- Design
- Discrete choice experiment on synthetic respondents drawn to the centi-millionaire segment, run three times across product marketing, interplanetary sentiment, and competitive comparison.
Subconscious.ai augmented the [client's] space tourism MVP in minutes. No wasted iterations. Good press coverage — not price — is the primary driver in consumer preference for [the client].