Linking Space Design Education with Agency Roadmaps for Exploration
- Paper number
IAC-09.E1.5.6
- Author
Dr. Ed Chester, CTAE, Spain
- Year
2009
- Abstract
Exploration is one of the principal motivations for many space activities, but due to economic, technological or strategic context, exploration missions themselves require long-term funding, planning, development and implementation that far exceed most other mission profiles. Individuals therefore typically are exposed to very few such activities in their professional lives. To maintain the perspective and consistency of exploration as an ongoing, incremental search, the top-level strategies are captured as roadmaps spanning decades. Roadmaps are developed, maintained, and defended on behalf of the industrial and scientific communities by the space agencies, and their importance is perhaps undervalued at other levels of the space sector. Students populate the other end of the space sector experience spectrum. To students, more so than professionals, exploration roadmaps are colourful illustrations of an exciting future (even if most of projects in that future will never be implemented). There is also an implication that the ideas presented are taken seriously, that missions will fly: that they can be a part of the teams working on these future projects. This short paper describes the approach and experiences of the author in creating a new space systems design course for Masters-level students of Aeronautic engineering in Catalonia. As mentioned above, exploration roadmaps provide interest and relevance, and so a core principal of the course development was to associate the material with actual projects and real ideas, rather than textbooks. In particular, the NASA and ESA exploration roadmaps proved to be an excellent central source for examining a number of disciplines, and joining them together in a consistent way. A number of shortfalls of other approaches, and in other courses taken by the same students, were identified as a result and are reported. The course concluded with a team project, which with the help of relevant agency and research staff in the USA and UK, was a small incremental step in mission design definition for Venus exploration – directly linked to the NASA Solar System Exploration Roadmap and the VEXAG white paper on Venus priorities. The paper presents the course structure and the links to exploration at each stage, followed by a description of the teaching process, and finally a summary of the team project and conclusions.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
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