Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) space vehicle integration and test status

The Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) Project is sponsored by the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate as part of the work conducted by the Technology Demonstration Mission Program Office. The goal of GPIM is to advance the technology readiness level (TRL) of a green propulsion technology based on the monopropellant AF-M315E via flight demonstration. As the Project lead, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. (Ball) is coordinating contributions from industry, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force to execute the GPIM project. The GPIM Project started in October 2012. The SV bus was integrated and ready for payloads on schedule 23 months after contract start (September 2014). Work on the bus went into a `bathtub' period to accommodate delays in payload arrival. In May 2014, post PDR, the GPIM Project was authorized to integrate three Air Force SERB payloads onto the GPIM space vehicle: iMESA, SWATS and SOS. These payloads were successfully integrated in June 2015. The Green Propellant Propulsion System (GPPS) arrived at Ball for integration in August 2015. SV integration and environmental testing has been successfully completed. The SV is in storage in a `bathtub' period while waiting shipment to the launch site. This paper summarizes the flexibility of the BCP-100 spacecraft and describes the work to integrate the payloads and go through SV environmental testing.