ISET ORS Bus Standards and Prototype

Advancing sound and accepted spacecraft bus standards is the objective of the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Bus Standards Initiative. This effort involves multiple government, industry, and academia participants assembled into an Integrated System Engineering Team (ISET). The core ISET industry team members include AeroAstro, Boeing, Design Net Engineering, General Dynamics Spectrum Astro, Loral, Microcosm, MicroSat, Orbital, Raytheon, and Swales. Government and Laboratory team members include the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), Air Force Space and Missile Command (AF SMC), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), MIT/Lincoln Laboratories (MIT/LL), Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC), and Space Dynamics Lab. The ISET generates standards for ORS spacecraft and uses them to build a prototype in order to evaluate and mature the standards. The ISET recently made the second major release of the bus standards documents that are available at the 21 AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites. This ISET team is also complemented by an open membership Business Team who provides business case factors for consideration in the standards definition, as well as for input for the acquisition transition plan. This paper describes the status of the ORS Bus Standards developed by the ISET to date including the implementation for the prototype build. REVIEW OF PHASE III OBJECTIVES The first objective of the ORS Phase III Bus Standards effort is to establish a national systems engineering working group with the US small satellite industry and academia to develop primary interface standards for a class of ORS spacecraft. The second objective is to obtain consensus and buy-in by maturing the bus standards in an open environment with broad government, industry, and academia participation. Lastly, Phase III intends to bridge the gap between Science and Technology (S&T) buses and an operational bus capability. This is being accomplished by prototyping a bus using the ORS system-level standards. Though not all of the standards will be validated through the prototype build, some critical elements such as mechanical and electrical interfaces between major space vehicle segments, including the payload to bus and launch vehicle to bus interfaces, will be validated. The paper is divided into two major subsections: the first section provides details of the Integrated System Engineering Team (ISET) and the bus standards, the second section details the bus standards implementation for the TacSat-4 mission.