Toward a Digital Platform for Spacecraft Manufacturing

Abstract

Professionals of many disciplines are involved in a spacecraft mission. They all use different software tools that are tailored to their tasks and they share data in various ways among themselves. These data sharing activities form a network, which, given modern software engineering practices, offers a lot of opportunities for improvement: simplify data source discoverability, automate previously manual data sharing activities, and better make use available data sources. To simplify data source discoverability, we propose a digital platform with a serviceoriented architecture. Such an architecture also helps to better make use of available data sources. Additionally, we present our projects that automate previously manual data sharing activities and that make better use of available data sources. With the development of the digital platform we aim at providing a significant reduction in resource expenditure, especially time expenditure, for spacecraft missions.