Applying Mainstream Design Approaches to Spacecraft Communications.

Helen Lurie.
RF Unicorn
BitBeam Technologies

Space is difficult and unusual. Many of the things we take for granted on the planet's surface don't work for engineering spacecraft. Because of this, we've built an edifice of space design techniques to mitigate the challenges with high probability. The problem is, this edifice causes spacecraft to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take upwards of 2 years to build and test (designing can take 4-6 years). The high price tag decreases further the acceptable failure risk, leading to a ratcheting number of tests and design reviews. A movement of people is trying to intelligently increase the acceptable risk profile by single digit percents, leading to logarithmic cost decreases. We will go through the space environment, look at the challenges, and learn about how one can overcome them and still use mainstream low cost design techniques.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Helen Lurie designs cheap and powerful electronics for spacecraft communications. At SpaceX she designed the telemetry acquisition systems for Falcon-9 and Dragon. She once stood on the deck of a ship, in the middle of the Pacific ocean, holding a DirectTV dish, and caught bits from a falling rocket. Ms. Lurie architected a complete communications system for the Planet Lab's Dove constellation of cubesats. Through the course of her career, spanning old aerospace, new space, alt space, and student space she's observed and integrated what works and what doesn't. Helen Lurie is the founder of BitBeam Technologies and is creating new and cheaper ways for nanosatellites to dump data to earth.

Contact information:

Helen Lurie
BitBeam Technoogies
email: Helen.Lurie@gmail.com