Modeling Process, Structure, & Assumptions for Rapid Spacecraft Design and Feasibility Analysis

In the early pre-project stages of space mission concept formulation, a concept team faces a complex tradespace with interwoven choices that often have cascading effects. Each option will have an estimated cost associated with it as well as potentially unique technical requirements - such as power, mounting, thermal, data, pointing, etc. - that will cascade to all aspects of a spacecraft design. To add to this already monumental challenge, early formulation can also face a high risk of a mission never making it beyond the concept level, adding a great deal of uncertainty to the outcome of invested resources. The Innovation Foundry at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) uses discretized levels for formulation called Concept Maturity Levels (CML). As a concept matures, there is often an iterative process between initial feasibility, tradespace exploration, and point designs or CML 2, 3, and 4 respectively. The Innovation Foundry has developed tooling which enables rapid design and tradespace evaluation while remaining within feasible bounds. Over the last few years, a systems engineering team at the Innovation Foundry have streamlined the Tool for Architectural Tradespace Exploration and Refinement (TATER) to improve efficiency of early spacecraft design and feasibility analysis at the spacecraft element level. TATER's new architecture and user experience enable a more expansive and in-depth exploration of a mission concept tradespace while requiring fewer resources over a shorter period. To accomplish this, the systems engineering team combined several improved approaches compared to prior versions of the tool spanning across process, structure, and default assumptions. First, the team created a brief questionnaire for scientists or project teams looking to iterate through an option tradespace. Next, the team implemented a more intuitive and natural workflow to guide a user through the design process. Finally, the team pre-populated TATER with default assumptions and suggestions while still maintaining a highly customizable set of overrides available to a designer for when design details (i.e. type of avionics or telecom band) are available. The end product of these improvements is a tool that can produce an element-level spacecraft mass and feasibility analysis by one systems engineer in only a few short hours. The team conducted a validation exercise both before and after these improvements and found no significant reduction in the accuracy of TATER. Early space mission concept formulation can benefit from the lessons learned by the systems engineers during this streamlining exercise. A concept formulation team can more efficiently iterate through a larger tradespace with fewer resources invested by refining the data exchange and modeling process, structure and user interaction with a tool, and identifying appropriate default assumptions as a starting point.