The paper aims to identify the critical success factors for space projects. A list of factors was synthesized from existing literature, and risk management and requirements management were added as the authors felt that these had particular significance in the space sector. The paper identifies 58 success factors that were then classified into 11 groups. These factors were then tested within the space industry using an elicitation technique, the data obtained was then analysed to test a number of research hypotheses. It was concluded that both requirements management and project risk management should be considered as critical success factors. The paper also uses the relative importance index approach to rank the classified categories based on their perceived importance.