In the predecessor to this paper, the government transition team at SMC which works with the DARPA space portfolio teams emphasized the importance of subject matter expertise technical insight and early influence on DARPA activities, particularly with the DARPA F6 program. Both of those emphasis areas have been proven out in the intervening eight years with good return on investments in the overall relationships. Though the envisioned flight demonstration of the free flying fractionated formation system DARPA F6 did not occur, we at SMC have obtained substantial use from key residuals designed to implement the key fractionation technology and information architecture, and analyse that architecture. Though considered "rocket science" by many, much of the work to define and assess space architecture options can be completely automated, thereby enabling many more options to be devised and assessed in less time. The Adaptable System Design and Analysis (ASDA) tool from DARPA F6 can effectively automate parts of "development planning", which in recent years has been stressed to produce decision quality products due to shortage of resources. This paper describes the progress in creating a rapid turn, low cost design space to assemble architectures from launch vehicles, satellite buses and instruments, into larger systems of systems and find those best options. This type of tooling or framework has been discussed before within the community, but has not been used for planning and programming decisions across the entire AFSPC and SMC portfolio. This approach addresses the key obstacles to the acceptance of an automated process for AFSPC and SMC and offers the strategy to transition the effort into the AFSPC and SMC portfolio. Key ideas to be covered include: how to obtain personnel to run the design space, how to affordably update the information in the data bases and assure that the framework itself is maintained. These issues are shown to be solvable with existing resources within the USAF space community. Other high fidelity tools and environments can be used at a lower price point if tools like ASDA are first used to cull down the trade space. In particular, the ASDA tooling should work synergistically with the Aerospace Corporation's Portfolio Decision Support Tool framework. The ASDA framework can be made to operate at different security levels to enable collaboration with many different parties. It is a lightweight framework which does not require special computational platforms. The entire tool can be written to a single CD/DVD disk.
展开▼