The Space Mission Incubator: A New Approach to Mission Design for the UK

Early trade-off studies are complex and rely on bringing expertise from diverse science and engineering backgrounds, as well as mission design heritage, into contact with the mission proposer. The University of Portsmouth (UoP) Space Mission Incubator provides a low-barrier service that gives access to this expertise to project teams, particularly in academia, who would otherwise struggle to find it; and accelerates the early stage of mission design, offering Mission Architecture studies that transform science requirements into element-level architectures within a week. The studies also serve as training and mentoring of future mission Principal Investigators (PIs) from UK institutions. This supports the ambitions set out in the UK’s National Space Strategy to “lead pioneering discovery” and “[grow] the UK as a science and technology superpower” by providing a clear path to mission development and leadership, and enables the development of a diverse pipeline of UK space missions. The Space Mission Incubator has been developed with the support of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)’s Team-X, including in-person observation of a study and long-term remote consulting. The Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) that forms the physical part of the Incubator service, and the software and datasets developed, were established with funding from the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and UoP. Team-X was selected as the inspiration for the CDF due to the similarities with our proposed model: there is a core team of personnel that are involved with all mission design studies, plus a dynamic part that changes for each study, pulled from the JPL Engineering organisation. This ensures that the processes and tools which underpin the activities and enable them to work so rapidly and successfully are thoroughly understood by a core fraction of the personnel in all studies, and for each study, additional engineering expertise for each subsystem and tailored to the study topic is drafted in. These dynamic team members are also familiar with the Team-X model as they are a pool that is called on multiple times. For the UoP Incubator, we analogously have a core team that is supplemented on a study-by-study basis with engineering expertise, including a core team member who plays the crucial facilitation role. In our case, we draw the sub-system expertise from the space industry, gradually building up a pool of “Subject Matter Experts” (SMX) that will be used to dynamically build future study teams. This takes advantage of the strength and breadth of the space sector in our local region (represented by the Space South Central cluster), and our strong existing academic-industrial relationships. The service model has been successfully demonstrated on two mission architecture studies and several other mission design activities. The Incubator was also used in the 2024 ESA Academy Concurrent Engineering Challenge with great success. The client PI (CosmoCube) of the first mission architecture study stated they felt they had made “as much progress in 2.5 days as they had in a year”. The facilitator role was highlighted as a key enabler. The understanding of the role, and the performing of the “magic trick” (successfully running a study) would not have been possible without the support of JPL Team-X.