Incremental and Disruptive Innovations in Space-Operations at DLR

Abstract

Operators of space segments currently face a bundle of new challenges. Specifically, the growing number of small satellites allows new players to enter the game. With this, new mission profiles, stricter budgetary limits, and new ways of operations are required. Especially for control centers of the long-established governmental agencies these changes might become a difficulty and require completely new ways of thinking. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) pushes several developments in this context: (1) It is planned to launch a series of small satellites for environmental studies. (2) A government-funded competence center for responsive space technologies has been established to develop an end-to-end test-bed for a resilient mission architecture. (3) The German Space Operations Center (GSOC) receives an increasing number of requests to fully operate or support operation of cube-sat missions from universities and small and medium-sized businesses. In addition, the development of optical links - space-to-space as well as space-to-ground - requires new strategies to operate the mission and its ground segments in much more agile ways than we were used to with radio frequency communication only. The same is true for future missions around the moon or even beyond, where different concepts for communication have to be applied. To cope with those challenges, DLR does both, incrementally improve the existing technologies and systems, as well as newly develop novel tools from scratch. However, these new developments may not be called "disruptive" compared to the radicalness demonstrated by start-ups entering "newspace". The presentation will give a short overview of the activities at DLR and discuss which way of development was chosen where and why. Together with the technical implications, we will also focus on the impact these developments have to the employees. Especially in a multi-mission environment provided by an agency like DLR, innovation often means finding synergies between several projects. But in turn, for the staff this may reduce the affiliation with a particular mission.