Bonding Composite TRAC Booms for NASA Missions

The Department of Defense (DoD) has identified a need for placing larger numbers of smaller, cheaper space assets into a variety of orbits to reduce its reliance on high value assets, improve resilience against adversaries, and bring greater responsiveness at lower cost. The capability of Small Satellite (Small Sat) payloads has rapidly improved over the past decade, providing an ideal candidate to fill the void in the DoD space asset spectrum. However, scaling down of traditional spacecraft bus systems to the Small Sat scale has presented fundamental performance limitations. The increasing payload capability compounds the acute need for increasing satellite performance, most notably power capability. The proliferation of Small Sat ridesharing has also placed more stringent requirements on stowed volume for deployable systems such as communication antennas and solar arrays.