Monitoring the scientific output and technological readiness level in the Space It Up! national space partnership

Space It Up! is a national space research program funded by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Ministry of University and Research, organized as a hub-and-spoke network with 33 partners across nine thematic areas. This paper reviews the scientific literature produced in the first two years, totaling 317 publications, and examines it along two main dimensions: the research performed and its progress toward practical use. A classification framework is developed from the publication texts along two orthogonal axes: research domains, divided into fourteen macrothemes and twenty-one sub-themes, and four cross-cutting topics. The program assesses each publication’s technological maturity using the NASA/ESA TRL scale. The program’s output falls into two categories: 213 publications related to technology development, evaluable on the scale, and 104 focused on scientific characterization, observation, theory, or policy, which have no scale value. The distribution covers the entire taxonomy, with no single theme exceeding 18% of the total, and is driven more by shared methods and environmental factors than by cross-disciplinary links; for example, Space Exploration appears in twelve themes, and Radiation/Space Environment in eleven. The technology development subset reflects an early-stage, exploratory research phase, with significant variation in the balance between the two categories across themes.