This paper presents research carried on by Thales on component based software engineering for the space domain. We outline the space domain context and give the general architecture of MyCCM, our component framework. We explain how we implemented a space-specific component framework with MyCCM and what results we got from experiments. Applying component design to on-board space applications induces a very light overhead while allowing automatic code generation, as well as code reuse and application redeployment. It thus helps cut development costs and improve the reliability of software development.