A Responsive Design and Evaluation Laboratory for Space Pointing and Tracking Systems

As commercial technologies are increasingly applied to space systems, commercial innovation timelines become not only possible, but essential in the modern space marketplace. To enable these timelines, new approaches to design, experimentation, and demonstration are needed in the space industry. Such approaches must be quick to return value, flexible to changes in technologies and industry trends, and responsive to internal and external customer demands. To explore this concept, we developed a “minimum viable lab” targeted at an enduring space-based use case: pointing and tracking. This lab supplies the foundation for achieving a simple, yet end-to-end, point and track mission capability, where each element can be independently developed and evaluated. System elements include scene generation, image capture/injection, mechanism control, processing/exploitation/dissemination (PED), and command/control (C2). To enable the efficiency and responsiveness goals of the lab, several design principles were employed, including simple system elements with low coupling, commercial standards, low-lead-time COTS, and bounded reliance on specialized subject matter experts (SMEs). Combined, these elements and principles provide an evolving framework that supports a broad set of responsive inquiry across the pointing and tracking domain. In this paper we describe the composition of the system elements, how the design principles guided those choices, specific trades and excursions supported by the lab, and future growth directions for the concept.