FANTM-RiDE Long-duration GEO Ops (LoGO) Development

The US space industry has primarily focused ridesharing and responsive space (including launch) on small satellites (smallsats) in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) regime, mainly because of spacecraft lifetime and disposal limitations of these small platforms. However, with continual advancements in miniaturization of space capabilities and developments in smallsat propulsions systems, interest is growing across the US space enterprise for increased ridesharing and responsive deployment and operations in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) altitudes. Space logistics platforms and capabilities for responsive delivery and in-space transportation of smallsats in GEO are still plagued by high sensitivity to launch schedules, difficult complexity of mission manifesting, prohibitive launch costs, and high mission assurance burdens. Currently, when GEO-capable smallsats are unable to make their launch schedule due to technical and/or programmatic issues, the payload providers must provide a flight-representative inert mass simulator (sim) to take its place. The development costs of designing these mass sims are not trivial because they must be spaceflight worthy, be designed to match the payloads’ mass and dynamics properties, and they must undergo the same environmental testing as the actual operational payload. With the complexities of furnishing these expensive mass simulators creates high mission integration difficulties, further increasing mission costs and often causing launch delays. Oftentimes, these manifest changes and incorporation of mass sims drive very costly coupled loads analysis (CLA) re-runs. Overall, smallsat access to GEO orbits remains extremely difficult despite advancements in increasing access in LEO. This Direct-to-Phase-II Proposal contains the effort required for Xtenti to develop its FANTM-RiDE™ (FR) Long-duration GEO Operations (LoGO ™) Dispenser variant to resolve these smallsat-to-GEO access issues. This development study builds off Xtenti’s development work with the US Government (USG) of the Baseline FR Dispenser system and its current work with Space Safari on its FR Long-duration Independent Operations (LIO) configuration that is optimized for the LEO regime. The FR LoGO variant expands the FR Dispenser family capabilities to payloads for long-duration storage and operations in GEO. In general, FR Dispensers substantially reduce mission integration complexity by containerizing FR Internal Payloads (FIPs) to decrease the real and perceived risks of allowing smallsats to join a multi-million-dollar launch mission;  manipulating the mass/dynamic response properties of the Dispenser to a pre-defined set of requirements; and independently provide commodities for the contained FIPs to enable long-term storage of payloads on orbit and on-demand deployment to provide mission flexibility and resiliency.