[Ground-station] Interplanetary CubeSat Workshop - poster session report + two brief presentation notes

[Michelle Thompson]

Here is a photo set of most of the posters from the poster session of the
August 2018 Interplanetary CubeSat Workshop at Goddard Space Flight Center.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/w5nyv/albums/72157700747415844

I missed at least one commercial "buy our full bus" poster and one from
NASA on their open source flight software (https://github.com/nasa/cFE).

The reaction about ITAR-free open source satellite work was strong,
enthusiastic, and positive. We made several contacts there, and are
building a lot of bridges with NASA for Phase 4 Ground and Space.

There were multiple presentations from a wide variety of companies that all
are bringing commodity busses to market, or are already in space with
various projects. They provide all the functions of a cubesat and most of
them are ready for extreme radiation environments (GEO, interplanetary).
They all present themselves as one-stop shops. You just bring your doo-dad
(scientific instrument, military project, commercial payload) and they take
care of the rest.

The Lunar Platform and the SLS "ring launcher" (which includes the
CubeQuest Challenge winners) were presented, and then we talked about them
afterwards off the record with several people at Goddard.

Criticism and defenses of both of these programs (LOP and SLS EM-1 flight)
can be found in a variety of places. There are some big shifts going on and
a lot of great science being done by instruments and spacecraft that are a
lot smaller than what we traditionally think of as being space-worthy.
Advances in all sorts of areas have lead to a steep increase in reliability
and cost. Some of these projects are CubeSats in name only, as they are not
modular and some of the designs would not be familiar to anyone working on
"traditional" CubeSats.

OK there will be more reports from the presentations themselves (I took
detailed notes) in late September. Two brief notes:

The contrast between the program leads from NASA and the industry people
that want to sell busses was pretty stark in several respects. The most
obvious was diversity. The trade show wing of the workshop was all white
and male and from mid-tier aerospace industry companies. There was at least
one start-up there, but most had been doing this for a while and have
decided to solidly move into CubeSat territory due to the increase in
market. The NASA and University speakers were very diverse in age, gender,
and race. The science was the focus, but each and every one of them talked
up the commercialization of space as if it was a net positive.

There was very little discussion during the official presentations of
militarizing space, but several slides had obviously been edited for
presentations to people that might be paying for all sorts of "Space Force"
goodies. It's completely unclear to NASA people that were there what the
policies will be, how it will affect things, whether or not any number of
programs will continue, or whether or not the Space Force will be a real
thing. They all have their heads down and are working hard on all sorts of
missions. I was told "Militarizing space in any additional way will add
another layer on top of an already complex and difficult process." I probed
around for more quotes but that's as far as anyone wanted to commit to.

-Michelle W5NYV
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