Spacecraft design

The design of spacecraft covers a broad area, including the design of both robotic spacecraft (satellites and planetary probes), and spacecraft for human spaceflight (spaceships and space stations). Spacecraft design was born as a discipline in the 1950s and 60s with the advent of American and Soviet space exploration programs. Since then it has progressed, although typically less than comparable terrestrial technologies. This is for a large part due to the challenging space environment, but also to the lack of basic R&D, and to other cultural factors within the design community. On the other hand, another reason for slow space travel application design is the high energy cost, and low efficiency, for achieving orbit. This cost might be seen as too high a "start-up-cost." Spacecraft design brings together aspects of various disciplines, namely: Astronautics for mission design and derivation of the design requirements, Systems engineering for maintaining the design baseline and derivation of subsystem requirements, Communications engineering for the design of the subsystems which communicate with the ground (e.g. telemetry) and perform ranging. Computer engineering for the design of the on-board computers and computer buses. This subsystem is mainly based on terrestrial technologies, but unlike most of them, it must: cope with space environment, be highly autonomous and provide higher fault-tolerance. It may incorporate space qualified radiation-hardened components. Software engineering for the on-board software which runs all the on-board applications, as well as low-level control software.