MOdular Spacecraft Assembly and Reconfiguration

ended

Since commercial exploitation of satellites was endeavored more than 50 years ago (Telstar 1 in 1962), commercial use of space became a huge and very much strategic market, reaching ~50 billion of USD in 2004, and in the range of 256 billion of USD in 2013 (OECD global estimates, 2014). Fierce competition is to be expected in the worldwide space industry to obtain major shares of the key commercial space segments. Offering cost effective, performant, reliable, scalable and flexible solutions will be essential to make the European space industry spearheading strategic segments of the commercial space. The development of novel, European technologies that would allow standardizing satellites components, facilitating their assembly, reducing time between customer’s orders and commissioning in space, repairing and upgrading components directly in orbit instead of replacing entirely a deprecated or damaged satellite, would provide extremely valuable competitive assets to establish European leadership in a number of key commercial space segments. Leveraging the outcomes of the Space Robotics Technologies SRC building blocks (from Call 1 / OG1,2,3,4,5), this proposal (MOSAR) aims to develop, integrate and demonstrate such technologies required to enable a fundamental shift of paradigm with satellites (and more widely spacecrafts) manufacturing and commercial space exploitation. As a key driver, MOSAR intends to leverage know-how and standards already available in the European space industry for satellites (small / nano sats in particular), to facilitate the uptake of project results by future customers. Key representatives of that industry are part of the consortium.