Survivability and Resiliency of Spacecraft and Space-Based Networks: a Framework for Characterization and Analysis

Considerations of survivability and resiliency have always been of importance in the design and analysis of military systems. Over the past two decades, the importance of survivability and resiliency has expanded beyond military systems to include public networks and infrastructure systems. The analysis and assessment of networked systems with respect to survivability has become particularly acute in recent years, as attested to by a growing technical literature on the subject. In this paper, we bring these considerations of survivability and resiliency to bear on spacecraft and space-based networks. We develop a framework for comparing the survivability and resiliency of different space architectures, namely that of a monolithic design and a distributed (or networked) space system architecture. There are multiple metrics along which different space architectures can be benchmarked and compared. We argue that if survivability and resiliency are not accounted for, then the evaluation process is likely to be biased in favor of monolithic spacecraft. We show that if in a given context survivability and resiliency are an important requirement for a particular customer, then a distributed architecture is more likely to satisfy this requirement than a monolithi