Research Highlights

Maintenance for satellite constellations is becoming an increasingly critical issue in the space industry, as it shapes demand for satellite manufacturing, materials, and launch services while directly affecting constellation availability and the ability to serve markets such as communications, Earth observation, and navigation. This research approaches constellation maintenance from a supply chain management perspective, examining how decisions made by stakeholders interact across the system. We develop and evaluate maintenance strategies under fixed supply chain structures, identifying critical bottlenecks and analyzing how solutions for one stakeholder influence other key players and the overall performance of the supply chain.

Space system design is often inseparable from the operational decisions that follow throughout a system lifecycle. In the case of on-orbit servicing (OOS), this research examines how design decisions such as satellite architecture and serviceability interact with operational decisions such as refueling, repair, upgrades, and service scheduling, and how these interactions affect system value and market adoption. In launch vehicle conceptual design, the focus shifts to the coupling between design decisions such as stage sizing and mass allocation and operational decisions such as trajectory design and flight requirement management, with the goal of identifying efficient vehicle configurations and flight paths.

Complex systems are composed of many interacting components, making their structure and behavior difficult to understand within the limits of human cognition. This research approaches complex systems by decomposing them into manageable modules, or more broadly, domains, analyzing the interactions among them, and reconnecting the results to support system-level understanding. We develop methods for analyzing and designing engineered products, organizations, processes, and multi-domain systems, with the goal of reformulating complex problems into human-solvable forms supported by computational tools.

Space systems are fundamentally shaped by the space environment, including orbital mechanics, solar radiation and particles, and interactions with other space objects. These conditions make the design and operations of space systems fundamentally different from those of terrestrial systems, making a deep understanding of the space environment essential to space engineering. This research branch studies the fundamentals of the space environment from design and operations perspectives, and applies these insights to relevant problems.