Recent literature on innovation policy elucidates three main rationales for policy intervention - market failures, systemic failures, and transformative failures. The neo-classical market failure doctrine prescribes a rather limited range of policy instruments. Governments should increase investments in knowledge production in the economy towards a socially optimal level. The evaluation of a policy intervention-based on the market failure rationale-focuses on well-established concepts, such as input and output additionality, to estimate whether public intervention increases inputs devoted to innovation and results in outputs that would not occur without intervention. A notable share of evaluations of public space programs report output additionality, such as indicators measuring extra turnover of space companies derived from extra spending to a space program. As impacts generally result from multiple causes, such studies suffer from the attribution problem. The national systems of the innovation approach stress the role of institutions and deliberate state coordination in the creation and coordination of knowledge and interactive learning processes, in which different types of agents are involved. The rationales for innovation policy intervention stem from the notion that the basic structural elements of the innovation system, and multiple links that connect the actors, may not function efficiently with respect to knowledge generation and diffusion. Along this line of thinking, governmental intervention focuses on capability building and facilitating links between different agents to support innovation. In empirical policy evaluations, the concept of 'behavioral additionality' has been introduced to assess the effectiveness of policy interventions. Behavioral additionality- i.e. persistent change in the conduct of policy beneficiaries-is generally not covered explicitly in evaluations of public space programs, but rather occasionally addressed implicitly. Transformative failures prevent processes of transformative change, which are necessary to tackle contemporary societal challenges from occurring in a socially undesirable way. Transformative change involves changes in technological, institutional, economic, organizational, and socio-cultural dimensions. For transformative change, the government should actively create new markets to give the economy a desired direction, and not merely intervene to fix market and systemic failures. This paper argues that the current tradition of impact assessments of public investments to space programs overlooks these market-creating and market-shaping roles of space programs. This paper promotes the concept of 'meso-level behavioral additionality' that complements the existing evaluation approaches by monitoring the institutional changes that are directly induced by projects funded from public space programs. The concept is applicable to monitor institutional development of emerging space markets.