De-risking the Future of Space

Governmental agencies used to dominate spaceflight efforts. But over the past decade, privately owned space transport companies have successfully penetrated large portions of the market. Today, several government-funded science and military space missions are being delivered by commercial companies.

The commercial spaceflight companies’ goals encompass more than scientific discovery and other projects with pure science objectives. Their use cases include imagery (supporting agriculture, military, and scientific goals), telecommunications, weather, tourism, and manufacturing in space. That shift has opened new opportunities for commercial companies that specialize in discrete steps in the value chain.

That’s causing a lot of shifts in “how space is done.”

For one thing, private companies tend to specialize in one segment of the value chain, such as launch vehicles, lunar rovers, SmallSat/CubeSat manufacturers, and component manufacturers. The disaggregation changes business operations and financing. 

Commercial companies’ budgets, priorities, and subsequent behavior are affected by the funding they receive from private equity and venture capital organizations. But whether they are self-funded or operate with a combined government-private investment, they pay close attention to risks and have oversight for goals such as achieving more with each spacecraft. 

Many of these efforts have positive business outcomes. For instance, companies working with small satellites and CubeSats will often find innovative ways to do more with less. Reusable rockets offer economies of scale for commercial launch service providers, including reducing costs and speeding mission turnaround. In parallel, there is rapid growth in single missions that can cost-effectively launch mega constellations of small satellites and CubeSats, especially in communications applications.

The difficulties of operating in the space environment are well known. Earth-based command and control can be time-delayed and error-prone. The challenge of access to an in-space vehicle makes physical servicing extremely costly, if not next to impossible. Despite best efforts, radiation, extreme temperatures, and lack of an Earth environment can introduce unexpected anomalies in the spacecraft and its systems.

All of these business factors influence the requirements to reduce risk, both pre- and post-launch — because budgets may be tight, but safety must never be compromised.

Technology Advancements

To mitigate risk and speed time-to-launch, several commercial space companies are using open source software platforms for avionics, mission control, verification, and application development. Such systems include NASA’s core Flight System (cFS), F Prime, Ogma, ROS 2, and QEMU. 

Linux has become the foundation of these software operating environments, too, especially for Class B–D missions and relatively inexpensive spacecraft. For Class A missions, a real-time operating system such as VxWorks® typically (though not exclusively) is the best way to assure mission performance and success. The Linux Foundation created a Space Grade Linux Special Interest Group to develop a common Linux distribution for space applications, which Wind River is helping to drive. Wind River offers Linux distributions to support such systems, including a Debian-based and Yocto-based subscription. 

Operating platforms must enable the hardware platforms for new space applications. One option for spacecraft developers is systems based on RISC-V, a royalty-free, open standard instruction set architecture. NASA’s High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) project is designed to deliver the performance required for space missions, including higher levels of autonomous performance, sensor data processing, and compute (taking advantage of artificial intelligence), and take action on that data. VxWorks already supports the HPSC and stands ready for your next mission.

IEEE SMC-IT

The space industry stands at a crucial inflection point. The demand for launch vehicles, mission platforms, and mission systems has never been greater. And there is a lot to talk about.

The IEEE SMC-IT event, held July 28 to August 1 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, offers a deep dive into the issues facing space systems, including AI and autonomy, extended reality (XR) and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), space robotics, open source technologies, and system verification and validation. As a Diamond sponsor, Wind River will join in presenting at the High-Performance Spaceflight Computing Workshop, and we will demonstrate our space-leading technologies in the exhibition. We hope you will join us there.