Small-Satellite Costs
نویسنده
چکیده
ighly capable small satellites are commonplace today, but this wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that modern small satellites came on the scene. This new breed of low-profile, low-cost space system was built by maximizing the use of existing components and off-the-shelf technology and minimizing developmental efforts. At the time, many thought that because of their functional and operational characteristics and their low acquisition costs, these small systems would become more prevalent than the larger systems built during the previous 30 years. But exactly which spacecraft fell into the new category? A precise description of small satellites, or “lightsats,” as they were also called, was lacking in the space literature of the day. The terms meant different things to different people. Some established a mass threshold (e.g., 500 kilograms) to indicate when a satellite was small; others used cost as a criterion; still others used size. Even scarcer than good descriptions of small satellites, however, were guidelines for cost estimation of smallsatellite projects. Clearly, a more useful definition of small space systems was needed. By the 1990s, because of increased interest in small satellites for military, commercial, and academic research applications, the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) asked The Aerospace Corporation for information about Small-Satellite Costs
منابع مشابه
Development of the Small Satellite Cost Model (SSCM) Edition 2002
0-7803-7651-X/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEEAC paper #1159, Updated December 19, 2002 Abstract⎯The paradigm shift in the late 1980’s from large satellites to small satellites required that new methodologies be developed to assess their cost. In 1991, The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) began to study small satellites to better understand the design principles that were being employed in their imp...
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