Today’s space ‘renaissance’ resembles little of the era that preceded it 50+ years ago. To understand the trends driving the proliferation in space, Constellations spoke with Josh Duncan, Principal Systems Engineer at Blue Canyon Technologies, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies that makes spacecraft and other products supporting many types of space missions, about recent notable developments.
One key driver behind today’s flourishing space ecosystem has been the newfound economies of scale that are changing the art of the possible. Duncan pointed to commercial proliferation in LEO as a case in point. With pricing and scheduling coming down and quantities available going up “all those pieces are now coming together enabling cost effective, agile, and powerful solutions coming out of the supply chain.” That ‘manufacturing readiness’ has enabled more players to enter the market to reap the benefits of participating in space, who in turn are supporting “unique new architectures that weren’t a viable trade in the past.”
Attraction extends to the military
Beyond appealing to commercial interests, government organizations have recognized the opportunities as well. The ability to leverage highly mature, commercial, commoditized products have become a game changer for the military.
One of the powerful ideas taking hold behind proliferation in LEO, Duncan noted, was the ability to support new concepts of resilience. “For years we’ve been thinking about how do we replace the big juicy targets with a set of disaggregated satellites that together provide a similar capability, but that are harder to defeat.” Now with components designed to last for two-to-five-year cycles, smallsat capabilities can be placed on-orbit more quickly and cost effectively than ever. For the military, technology insertion can occur more rapidly and affordably to replenish and advance its capabilities.
Evolution of multi-orbit approaches
Yet, despite the success of smallsats, Duncan dismissed the notion that LEO constellations would completely displace larger spacecraft -- there would always be uses and business cases for MEO and GEO. “It’s more about looking at creative architectures that employ multiple classes of assets, even potentially in different orbital regimes, and using those as a collective to deliver an end product that takes the best assets and melds them together,” he said.
New constellations can provide resiliency and quickly connect end-users to data, but they also present new challenges compared to the traditional architectures and stovepiped programs of the past. They require an “incredible number of disparate assets in the air and on the ground to communicate,” Duncan said. “Lacing together commercial and native DoD capabilities” to deliver the best possible network across space and ground architectures is an exciting concept, but also a “challenging architectural nut to crack.”
Digital engineering paves way for new complexity
Working through the complexity of these new architectures and systems is no small matter. For an industry that has long prided itself on reliability, breakthroughs in virtualized test infrastructure and modeling now allow the processes of spacecraft manufacturing to be worked through in advance, from design and hardware integration to supply chain. Model-based engineering and “digital twins” are becoming de facto processes. Military solicitations are requiring these approaches in order to “solve problems at an operationally relevant timescale compared to more traditional development lifecycles,” Duncan said.
Borrowing from IT
For all of the space industry’s innovation, not all of it is entirely new. Duncan pointed to some of its most powerful concepts of late that originated elsewhere, such as software-defined satellites and the cloud, whose roots are in ground-based IT.
By “robbing the best of what we’ve discovered in data centers, with virtualized compute and virtualized networks, we now have the benefit of more flexible deployments,” Duncan added. Rather than deploying processing in hardware, the military is virtualizing processing as well. “Resources can now be optimized and adjusted on orbit which allows them to adjust to threats, which has traditionally been a difficult thing,” he added.
No ‘easy’ button
Even with standardization and the ability to use commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities, challenges abound. “As I talk to people about new space, there’s often this expectation that there’s an ‘easy’ button. Now, everything’s small, fast and easy, it’s also super high performance and super cheap. But there’s not one right answer for everyone.”
But the future is bright, Duncan said, noting how these new technologies and flexible solutions can be quickly adapted. Industry, the Department of Defense, and the science community “now have the agility to react and get capabilities in orbit as quickly as possible.”
“All the parts in architecture, launch, and comms have to come together to provide solutions in that responsive timeframe.” To deliver that performance and reliability, “the whole ecosystem has to fit together.”
Click here to listen to the full interview.
