As much as we love supporting space engineers solving real problems for the people of Earth today, we also enjoy helping out those teams building innovating solutions and concepts for the applications of tomorrow.
In this article we take a look at three aspects of building solutions for future opportunities or challenges.
Scanning the horizon
The space supply chain operates a little differently to those in other industries.
Progress and growth aren’t predictable, exponential, or even linear most of the time. Instead, because of long qualification procedures, extended launch timelines, and impacts of mission failures, progress seems to happen little by little and then all at once.
After some rideshare missions we’ve seen multiple new technologies prove their capability in orbit and launch more fully to the market. Areas of technology with little new innovation for several months suddenly get a number of new options, and mission designers need to be able to adapt to the available solutions, or face lagging behind competitors.
For engineers committed to a real program of space innovation, and not just scrambling to meet the next mission’s milestones, it is important to constantly scan the horizon and understand what options out there could help you tomorrow as well as today.
There are many ways to approach this. Some rely on conferences or research papers a few times a year, others on annual reports, and larger teams can always count on some suppliers proactively contacting them to try and build interest in the products and services of the future.
In the modern industry, the satsearch platform and supply chain service are also great options for achieving this. We can help your team analyze the global supply chain and find suitable options for any aspect of your mission or service. You can leverage our dedicated contact network to build relationships with relevant companies and organizations.
Just get in touch today and let us know what you’re looking for here.
Another reason to scan the horizon is to ensure that you aren’t wasting time by
Duplicating development
If you’re really trying to push the envelope there’s always a chance that someone else is working on the same thing.
In the space industry this happens quite often. Sometimes competing teams are racing for the same objective (launch being the most famous such area) and sometimes the ultimate targets might be wildly different, but the enabling tech needed to reach them is similar.
Space has a culture of confidentiality. This is changing, to some extent, in the commercial sector, but with so many defense- and intelligence-related applications, and a history of international competition, many projects are simply not shared.
We speak to hundreds of suppliers in a typical month and we’re always asking for more information about current and previous clients, to help assess heritage and performance. And time and time again we hear that companies would like to share more, but they just can’t. And that needs to be respected.
But if you’re building something for the future – some solution that will open up new possibilities in space – it would be very helpful to have a clear picture of who else is trying to do the same and assess whether you could work together (in a partnership or as customer-supplier) to go faster.
Because space is such an unforgiving domain I understand why so many companies choose to keep a lot of development in-house. Even though there are more options on the market than ever, having the in-depth engineering knowledge about your proprietary system, and team experience, that comes with building it yourself is important.
But sometimes there is a need for speed. Hitting ambitious development milestones is mandatory, and if you need outside help to do that, then so be it.
What shouldn’t be a factor in this decision, but so often is, is that some teams simply don’t know what others are working on, even though there are public details available.
At satsearch, we help solve this problem by opening up the space industry supply chain on our platform – transparently sharing information about technologies that are coming to market but are not yet at TRL9.
We also directly help teams source new options with our free commercial tender solution and, if they let us know they’re open to hearing about solutions that are yet to be fully proven, we can take that into account and make more supplier introductions.
So, if it’s time your team took a closer look at similar technologies to those you have in development, and you have a genuine intent to potentially procure a solution, just let us know your requirements today.
And when it comes time to assess potential systems, ensure you consider how exactly a certain technology can be adapted to a different application, as discussed in the next section.
Adapting today’s tech to tomorrow’s missions
It’s a fairly obvious point but when you take one form of space technology and use it in a domain that it hasn’t yet been tested in, you’ll always take on a level of risk.
Whether you’re going from LEO to GEO, MEO to the lunar surface, or GEO to deep space (just to name a few examples) you need to understand how the operational environment, and the transport option to get you there, might affect your system.
For example, the recent successful Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost lunar mission (part of NASA’s CLPS initiative) had onboard 10 NASA research instruments that were carefully engineered to work in that environment.
But in the commercial sector many companies are looking to adapt existing subsystems and components for use in different domains, rather than build everything bespoke each time. Saving money and time in the process.
The challenge is to ensure performance, and mitigate risk, while accounting for many unknowns.
For certain technologies this issue has been tackled head on. For example, in the latest NASA State-of-the-Art of Small Spacecraft Technology report the authors have recommended a complementary mission readiness scale for thrusters called Progress Toward Mission Infusion (PMI).
Part of this is ensuring that propulsion units account for end-user applications – for example; a thruster may be TRL 9 for operation in LEO but untested, and considered to be at a lower TRL, for GEO – along with a deep understanding of the technology itself.
In practice however, both of these criteria can be hard to measure.
If the system has never been to GEO you can only simulate performance there.
And if you can’t get any more technical detail out of the supplier (a common problem in the often secretive space industry) you can’t fully assess how it might work.
Squaring this circle is something we help mission teams with on a regular basis.
It comes down to supply chain knowlegde and trust; we can help you identify more relevant options across the world (quickly and easily) and you can leverage our huge network of contacts to have candid and open conversations about the technologies you are interested in.
It’s time to accelerate your mission program with satsearch.
Let’s take your innovation and solutions into new domains, solve harder problems, and generate greater value for Earth, together.
