Progressive automation in aerospace systems

Increasing automation in satellites and satellite control systems can lead to reduced operation costs and safer operation of the spacecraft. In a way, up-front development costs are being traded for long-term operation costs over the program life. With the increasingly parallel development of the spacecraft components and ground systems, the paper argues for an incremental approach to automation beginning with component integration and test. This incremental approach increases the probability of successful automation and reduces the development costs. Use of a scripting language that allows the automation to evolve over the life of a program is recommended and is compared to conventional coding and expert system development. The paper provides a discussion of necessary language features and considers tradeoffs among programming languages, proprietary commercial scripting languages, and open source scripting languages.