Improving Spacecraft Reliability Through Digital Transformation

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the reliability engineering benefit achievable by spacecraft digital transformation. The space industry has evolved in the past decade to increasingly incorporate new computing practices into the sector’s ground service and backoffice operations, hailed as a “digital transformation” of their information technology (IT) infrastructure. Parallel sectors that heavily engage control systems, such as utilities and manufacturing, have not only embraced an IT digital transformation but also incorporated new computing architectures, chipsets, and data processing techniques into their operational technology (OT) systems. The space sector has lagged to adopt such digital technologies for their OT, such as spacecraft, and has not realized many of the associated benefits. Through a reliability engineering analysis of small satellites and a comparative case study of a digitally transformed solar sail, we demonstrate the reliability impacts of digital transformation for spacecraft.