Architecting industry for responsive space

Abstract

Over the past several years, there has been a growing interest within the United States defense department for something called responsive space. This movement is a reaction to a number of factors, the two most significant are: increasingly capable and miniaturized technologies and warfighter's needs for new capabilities in a network centric, system-of-systems age. Through the last 50 years of the military development of space systems, a spiral of increasing redundancy, capability and mission duration coupled with growing costs and schedules has made space increasingly unresponsive. Responsive space hopes to break out of this paradigm with agile and more capable small spacecraft employment. By lowering the cost and correspondingly shortening the timeliness, new niches for space-based systems will open up. These capabilities could be the "pointy end of the spear" with force applications deployed globally through common aero vehicles (CAV) on ready low cost launchers. Or they could they could be used to support intelligence, like a responsively launched and operated hyper spectral imaginary (HSI) payload flying on a common bus that was pulled out of storage and plugged into a payload through common interfaces. These responsive systems do not seek to replace traditional DoD space missions, but merely to augment the national strength with a new subset of capabilities. This will provide the joint war fighters and the national decision makers with new tools. Not every mission will be responsive, such as GPS and missile warning, which are needed in their current static peacetime configuration, but if responsive space is successful in some of its niches, many other systems could benefit from a responsive component of their architecture to supply capability on demand. Within the myriad of responsive space efforts underway, one of the drivers that has often been overlooked is the importance of the commercial market. Specifically, how important it is for driving costs down to make responsive space capabilities affordable to use. Responsive space systems must be simple enough and architected such that they are cost competitive for the function they perform. The overall approach must be incremental, however the initial capabilities must provide something short term that will show obvious utility to get the transformation started. Economies of scale from these initial capabilities will lower costs and increase launch vehicle fleets and satellite launch rates such that we break out of the current paradigms. For this to be possible we must develop highly modular systems to maximize the spacecraft lot size. Large lots are most important at initial stages, when responsive space systems will be easiest to dismiss as too expensive. This is really only achievable by considering commercial needs for the system as well. Satellite buses and launch vehicles that are designed for military purposes need to be flexible enough that they can support commercial needs as well. The cost is an important requirement and depends of the market depth. The US government must work with its industry and possibly even international partners to help develop common interfaces and standards that can be applied for a wide spectrum of users to bring down cost, across the board. Responsive space must be architected such that it takes advantage of the commercial market and applies a commercial mindset if it is to be successful