Cost reduction in long-term space missions by facilitating and exploiting planned IT infrastructure upgrades

Abstract

In long-term space missions, lasting 10+ years, there is a clear disproportion between the ground segment IT systems lifecycle and typical IT system lifecycles. While mission performance and platform requirements are more or less fixed ahead of a mission, IT computing performance advances exponentially during mission lifetime. This advancement causes an exponential drop in price per computation. Unfortunately, almost no missions make use of the advancement of IT technology during their lifetime. If missions were able to follow these improvements of IT, significant savings with regards to power consumption and data center space would be possible. This is in particular applicable to shared spacecraft control centers. In such a scenario, it might even be possible to avoid the construction of entire facilities. Based on an initial analysis of the factors involved, we propose an approach to make use of advancements in IT technology during mission lifetime without complicated migration steps, resulting in overall cost savings compared to a frozen IT infrastructure. Our technical approach includes virtualization on all levels as the main driver. By using virtualization along with a middle middle layer, we decouple the operational software from the underlying infrastructure, thereby facilitating migration strategies that keep infrastructure in line with general IT improvements. On the financial side, we quantify the potential benefits of the technical improvements occurring during a typical mission lifetime. By making use of the outcome of this initial basic research and applying it to a typical mission operations scenario, we show the potential cost savings in a real-world configuration. In order to apply our findings to a real-world configuration, we have researched on three larger programme size sample missions/groups of satellites with a operational duration of 15-20 years. Our finding here has been that with only a single migration after 5 years of mission runtime, electricity costs can be reduced by approximately 63% or a total of €5.8 M (~6.5M USD at the time of writing). In the same context, we have found a savings potential on CO2 emissions in the range of 29,857 tonnes or an equivalent of 169,456,887 km travelled by a standard car.