[thadjones]

I develop spacecraft architectures for work and the spacecraft design bible is Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD [1]. While much of the information in SMAD can be generalized to cubesats it is focused primarily on larger missions, so its nice to see a book focused on the cubesat space. Briefly flipping through this text, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much theory and context is packed in with application and analysis. The fact that its a free download is such a bonus!

I've been slowly building out a webapp [2] that allows people to design a satellite from scratch, and this book provides a lot of the key technical analyses in a really approachable way. As I build out more of the system trades and analysis modules, I'll definitely be referencing this text to make sure the tools can be utilized from the cubesat perspective.

[1]: https://astrobooks.com/spacemissionengineeringthenewsmadsme-...

[2]: https://vesperastro.com

[ginkgotree]

very cool! This was quite literally manually scraping manuals and spec sheets, and plugging into excel for me. Rather that be for Size, Weight, Power budget, or even interfaces. I'd love to see a drag and drop tool the plops out an ICD, power budget, etc. One observation I've had on my missions: compatability is often a mess of drivers and just getting components to talk to one another, and the details are behind NDAs and export laws, etc. GRanted, even just solving the early phases of ICD and the general (does this mission fit in an 8U/12U, etc bus), would be a massive help. Very cool project that I could see becoming a paid tool

[thadjones]

Appreciate it! Totally agree, your experience is what drove me to start building Vesper in the first place. Not only do you have to find the right hardware and manually scrape the specs, but then any time you change hardware you have to update it across a number of docs - keeping them all synced is a pain. And the alternative is an incredibly time-intensive and bloated MBSE model... My end hope is that Vesper can blend the low barrier-to-entry of an excel analysis with the interconnectedness of an MBSE model.

The goal is to get to exactly what you describe, with drag and drop tools that then basically give you an export of all your interconnects and performance analyses. As you point out, the reality is that the devil is in the details. For now, Vesper is focused mostly on surfacing the high-level, sanity check interface concerns and performance calculations, but I hope it can still add value at the concept definition -> proposal -> PDR phase of a program.

I also agree wholeheartedly with your other comment that some of the biggest challenges are jumping through the regulatory hoops like FCC licensing and range safety, so maybe once I've got the technical stuff limping along I can take a look at how to incorporate that process somewhat.

[ginkgotree]

Yep, It's layer cake of pain, for the joy of getting to orbit. Agree, your approach makes sense to tackle the layer you are on now - which is just the "wiring" I'm in the cUAS space currently with a missile startup (which has many similarities to small sats), with that said, I have some contacts in the Small sat / commercial new space industry that would be interested in this. I also do have a small sat concept I hope to get into orbit when I have the time to make a flat sat prototype to sanity check the payload. Feel free to shoot me an email [e-mail] - would love to stay in touch on this project and see where I can help, and potentially be a customer

[notahacker]

Like the look of what you're doing with Vesper.

Is your roadmap more "Satsearch for broader range of spacecraft mass classes" or "generate initial mission and spacecraft architecture from simple input parameters"?

[thadjones]

Thanks! The goal is for it to be primarily an architecture tool, although right now it leans more towards SatSearch as I think that will get eyes faster and because there needs to be a decently robust component library for the architecture tools to work. The idea is that you can set your primary mission parameters and CONOPs, and then to get immediate feedback on spacecraft performance metrics as you trade/change hardware in the Master Equipment List. Maybe the best way to think of it is as "PCPartPicker for spacecraft".

For example if you add/change a radio transmitter, you can see in real-time how that changes your system mass, power, and link margins, or be alerted if your flight computer doesn't support your radio's data interface.

This (hopefully) lets a spacecraft systems engineer iterate through trades more quickly, track performance and margin evolution over a program lifecycle, or quickly develop a baseline for a given mission class.

Definitely quite a bit of work to go to get there but feel free to create an account and poke around and break things.