Commercial Support for Civil Space Agencies and Organizations CubeSat Activities
NASA, and other U.S. government space civil agencies, have long been a great supporter of Cubesat activities, especially within academic and emerging space communities. Over the past several years, these civil space agencies and organizations have provided funding for emerging space projects and also access to space. The result of this support is civil space…
Container Based Virtualization Applied
The satellite ground segment has become reliant on hypervisor-based virtual machines (VMs). Things that took days, weeks or even longer using the previous bare-metal approach are now being accomplished in minutes or less. As good as virtual machines are can container-based virtualization technology provide additional benefits to hypervisor-based virtualization? In a container-based virtualization environment the…
Open Sourcing the Ball Aerospace COSMOS Command and Control System
Ball Aerospace COSMOS is a free and readily available open source command and control system for operations and test that brings a set of functionality to the aerospace community that has previously only been available in proprietary and expensive COTS solutions. Open source software like COSMOS fills a very specific need for SmallSat/CubeSat missions where…
Space Launch Automation and Integration: A Common Architecture for Mission Assurance, Safety, and Launch Operations
For decades, the gateway to space has been through the Eastern and Western Launch Ranges (E/WRs). The collaboration of the governing agencies, FAA, USAF, and NASA provides a commercial alternative to past practice with greater reliance on telemetry and automation. The need for mission assurance and public safety in all phases of flight, on-orbit operations,…
The NOAA Satellite Observing System Architecture Study
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is conducting an analysis to plan its future operational environmental satellite architecture. This is an opportunity to design a more agile space architecture, which NOAA defines as a set of instruments, their allocation to orbital platforms assigned to specific orbits, and a set of rules by which the…
XEUS: A Powerful Path to Beyond LEO Activity
XEUS, the eXperimental Enhanced Upper Stage, fulfills a need for an affordable, large commercial lunar lander vital to creating a cis-lunar economy and developing recurring activities beyond LEO. XEUS enhances ACES with a mission kit to enable the stage to reach destinations beyond LEO and function as a lander upon arrival. Several elements of the…