Engineering, Design, and Launch Arrangements of Smallsats

Abstract

For many decades there was a conventional wisdom about how to design, build, test, and launch application satellites – mainly “requirements-driven,” based on detailed and often very complex specifications or constraints in documents issued by space agencies or large companies. These “conventionally designed” satellites were intended to sustain commercial or governmental services for telecommunications, broadcasting, remote sensing, meteorological services, navigation and positioning, etc. The basic design of a satellite was based on the premise that any spacecraft needed to be built to sustain operations for many years in the hostile environment of space. Since these satellites were quite expensive due to dedicated launches, care was taken to make sure that all of the components of the satellites were carefully qualified and tested. Such satellites were sent to various types of testing facilities, such as inside thermal vacuum chambers, on shaker tables, and many more for quite extensive testing to ensure that they would operate and function for a long time in space after launch. These satellites had built-in redundancy of key components to allow switching to back-up systems when failures occurred – often with more than one instance.