SATELLITE SERVICING AS A MEANS TO INCREASE SPACE MISSION RESILIENCE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT: A PARAMETRIC ARCHITECTURE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Satellite servicing and associated capabilities have the potential to establish a new space mission design and operation paradigm throughout Earth orbit. By integrating fundamental elements of the logistics chains that complex engineered systems enjoy on Earth’s surface to Earth’s orbit, the feasible domain for space missions will significantly expand. Some estimates suggest that the burgeoning satellite servicing industry could generate over 14 billion United States Dollars in revenue over the next decade, driven in large part by growing demand from satellite operators in Low Earth Orbit. However, despite significant economic development and the modern shift of commercial and government space industry focus to Low Earth Orbit, the study of satellite servicing architecture design in this context requires more analysis to mature. Existing satellite servicing mission design literature generally investigates the system design problem as an economic feasibility analysis or system optimization problem. A subpopulation of this literature introduces novel design metrics to the system design process, such as mission flexibility, bringing significant utility to mission designers. In recent years, mission resilience has proven to be a space mission design metric of significant interest to a diverse set of stakeholders such as the United States Department of Defense. Despite its rapidly expanding use, resilience in the context of space mission design has been described primarily qualitatively, limiting its engineering use. Satellite servicing, as with other applications of engineering resilience techniques, aims to integrate capabilities into a complex system that enables a response to system degradation in a favorable manner. This thesis develops a robust simulation framework to parametrically investigate the Low Earth Orbit satellite servicing system design space in the context of scenarios of interest, such as the potentially degrading events of solar storms, orbital debris collisions, and natural satellite failures. A focus will be placed on quantifying the effects on system resilience that satellite servicing can afford Low Earth Orbit constellations. First-order space mission design parameters will be parametrically investigated using the developed analysis and simulation framework. Through leveraging the Earth’s J2 perturbation to help route servicer satellites efficiently throughout a constellation of modeled customer satellites, it will be shown that the integration of satellite servicing capabilities into Low Earth Orbit constellations can significantly increase system resilience inside the performance constraints of existing space vehicles. Satellite Servicing system design strategies will be presented that can be employed to increase mission resilience and feasibility.