Collaborative Space Design project: A student’s experience

The student members of the Collaborative Space (systems) Design (CSD) project discuss its implementation and highlight its concepts. The CSD project is an elective course at the MSc Space Flight programme at the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, where students exercise the design process of a space mission, spacecraft or a major spacecraft subsystem in a team setting, along with several important external stakeholders. Focus was given to the application of concurrent engineering and systems engineering techniques. Interaction between the students and the external stakeholders was also extremely valued. Two teams participated, one designing a liquid oxygen electric pump and one a CubeSat asteroid observer mission. In this work the students report their experience, highlighting how they approached the different phases of the design process. Positives and negatives of the course are also presented, together with some feedback on potential modifications to future editions of the course.