Orbital ATK is the primary developer of the Cygnus spacecraft, which is the company's flagship vehicle for logistics support for the International Space Station (ISS) under NASA's Cargo Resupply Service (CRS) contracts. Cygnus has seven successful resupply missions to the ISS, with four additional missions scheduled under CRS1 and a minimum of six missions under CRS2. Orbital ATK is taking the experience learned from the Cygnus missions and applying them to their NextSTEP (Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partners) contract, which is looking at adapting a Cygnus vehicle into a habitat for deep space exploration. This paper will look at using Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methodology and System Modeling Language (SysML) to develop a reference architecture of the Cygnus spacecraft. Once the reference architecture is developed, the SysML model will be used to optimize the development of a Cygnus derived cislunar habitat architecture for deep space exploration. The cislunar habitat will support NASA's Journey to Mars exploration architecture. The reference architecture approach will allow for a future variant of the Cygnus spacecraft to be developed and tested in a virtual environment, saving the company development time and costs.
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