Rapid CubeSat Development

BlackLynx Technologies is please to submit a proposal in response to AF191-007 Special Topic, Rapid CubeSat Development. Our company is well poised to address current schedule issues with CubeSat missions by focusing on time requirements associated with a) Mission Concept Development and Requirements Allocation, a significant portion of the Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE), and, b) hardware procurement, a combination of both NRE and Recurring Engineering (RE). Our approach to the study involves defining processes that make heavy use of our mission modelling expertise and tool set to reduce the concept design phase while constraining the problem to available hardware, thus reducing NRE across the program. BlackLynx also intends to show how more capable on-board processing, also referred to “edge compute,� could be leveraged to define very capable and expandable payload processing in order to further reduce NRE in both the spacecraft and payload designs. Furthermore, this on-board capability would alleviate downlink requirements and the need for high speed communications links during the mission. Streamlined communications results in streamlined frequency allocations. The following proposal will lay out the details of our approach and the impacts to a CubeSat development cycle.