Astro Law as Common Law Extended into the Outer Space Territory
- Paper number
IAC-05-E6.4.03
- Author
Mr. Declan ODonnell, United Societies in Space, Inc., United States
- Year
2005
- Abstract
Small satellite customers increasingly demand reliable, capable and cost effective spacecraft for business case driven missions. Commercial considerations dictate that the opportunities to test new technologies without risk or schedule impacts to such small spacecraft are diminished. A need exists for a capable, reliable yet order-of-magnitude lower cost spacecraft for customers on a tightly constrained budget (typically less than $1M per bus); and organisations seeking to rapidly test new technologies. A further requirement from established spacecraft companies is to train new engineering staff using real flight hardware and data.
Whilst Cubesats are widely used by academia and a few commercial organisations; they are highly constrained in mass, payload power and volume; and lack standardisation of some critical subsystems notably power and telemetry / telecommand. The relatively poor reliability of Cubesats indicates they would benefit from heritage subsystems, allowing missions to focus on trialling new technologies. In contrast, SNAP-1, a nanosatellite launched in 2000 demonstrated the potential of short timescale (9 months), approx.$1M budget class missions, when backed by an industrial organisation. Many SNAP-1 derived subsystems currently support SSTL microsatellites today; although rebuilding SNAP is not considered cost effective. Issues include the increased cost of using subsystems now adapted for much larger microsatellite missions, and the unavailability of key items in a small form factor, such as an on-board computer; which favour an SSTL-100 spacecraft such as DMC over a nanosatellite.
The University of Surrey Space Centre has developed PCBSat, to establish the smallest form factor which could offer the satellite functionality and host a useful payload. PCBSat is a true ‘entry level’ spacecraft design, with a parts count sum of approx.$2000, and could support the technology testing requirements industrial training requirements. A number of PCBSats operating as a free flying cluster, or equipped with an ability to operate in a formation offers the potential for distributed or fractionated space missions, with applications in space situational awareness, wide area space science and potentially support of space tourism.
This paper describes how PCBSats combined with key, critical subsystems adapted from microsatellite heritage equipment could provide an attractively priced offering for the low budget community where mission requirements exceed Cubesat capability. Academic and industrial partnerships also offer the opportunity to explore radical new designs such as fractionated spacecraft, which pose unquantifiable risks to commercially driven programmes. This paper will discuss am ‘entry level’ mission platform to be made available to customers with a limited budget.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-05-E6.4.03.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
To get the manuscript, please contact IAF Secretariat.