Small Satellite Producibility, Affordability Approaches and TacSat 4 Design for Manufacturing and Assembly Results

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) working under the direction of the Office of Force Transition (OFT) established an Integrated System Engineering Team (ISET) and satellite industry business team with the charter to develop small satellite bus standards. As part of this work a plan was developed to lower the cost of satellites thus enabling an Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) vision for flexible satellite missions. The vision is to increase ORS satellite rate production from ~1 satellite per year (lab provided) to ~5-10 busses per year and these would be provided by an industrial base using proven producibility and manufacturing methods. The OFT/NRL approach is to balance mission satellite utility with industrial know how given a set of reasonable standards in order to reduce cost and produce an affordable constellation of off-the-shelf satellites. To assist in this vision, Raytheon Missile Systems facilitated a Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) workshop with the ISET on March 6 and 7, 2007 using the TacSat 4 baseline design as the starting point. DFMA is a design methodology that considers manufacturing effort and cost as functions to be minimized, given the constraints of the customer requirements. The goal of the workshop was to identify current constraints affecting integration and assembly of satellite manufacturing today