The Small Satellite Reliability Initiative: A Public-Private Effort Addressing SmallSat Mission Confidence

Presently, most CubeSat components and buses are generally not appropriate for missions where significant or indeterminate risk of failure is unacceptable. This has precluded their use in many cases where their attributes could otherwise enable or enhance mission objectives. However, in the future, CubeSats and SmallSats, which deviate from CubeSat form factors but often incorporate CubeSat components and subsystems, will address challenges that many presently consider to be beyond the platform’s capabilities. This growing potential utility, combined with the limited volume of successful CubeSat flight heritage, is driving an interagency effort to improve small satellite mission confidence. The Small Satellite Reliability Initiative (SSRI)—an activity with broad participation from civil, DoD, and commercial space systems providers and stakeholders—has been targeting this challenge. This paper will update the community on how the public-private collaboration is being executed. It will discuss mission confidence approaches considered and defined to date, why and how they were derived, and next steps the team will implement to broaden SmallSat mission potential