A Further Look at Potential Impact of Satlets on Design, Production, and Cost of Satellite Systems

For the past 50 years, the morphology for satellites has remained fundamentally unchanged despite evolutions in manufacturing, communications, and software occurring in other industries. Primary spacecraft support systems—power, attitude control, and others—are designed in the same way, whether in space telescopes, large communications satellites, interplanetary spacecraft, or Cubesats. This paradigm has been the status quo in spacecraft design and construction and has precluded any industry-wide, large-scale cost savings while maintaining performance. To change this trend and ensure performance and utility at low cost, that can scale, DARPA postulated the concept of a cellularized satellite, or “satlet,” as a satellite architectural unit. In this new morphology, each satlet would provide some fraction of the overall functions that, when aggregated via hardware and software, provide spacecraft space system with its complete required capabilities. The DARPA Phoenix program has developed this satlet morphology in Phase I and plans to validate and demonstrate it in a series of steps that exercise various applications and levels of configuration flexibility enabled by a satlet architecture. The first system experiment is planned to be conducted on orbit in 2015. This paper aims to take a deeper look at the potential impact of space systems with cellular based designs, and using historical data showcases how design, production and ultimately cost can form the foundation for next generation spacecraft opportunities. A first order analysis conducted in a previous paper indicated that U.S.-launched satellites alone could create a market demand for 2,000-8,000 satlets flown per year, while the overall annual world satellite market could create demand for 10,000-40,000 satlets. This paper explores the instantiation of a cellular morphology to design, production and development to further quantify the impact of this revolutionary space system capability. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article/presentation are those of the author/presenter and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the Department of Defense. 1 Program Manager, DARPA/TTO Senior Engineer, Space Systems Integration; Lecturer, University of Southern California-Department of Astronautics 3 Project Engineer, ManTech 4 Program Manager, NASA Ames Research Center 5 Senior Systems Engineer, Kinsey Technical Services Inc. 6 Senior Principal Engineer, Space Systems Integration 7 Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California, Department of Astronautics, Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences, the Information Sciences Institute and Industrial and Systems Engineering Departments