Engineering Commons^™

The Differences Are Not So Great: High Altitude Balloon And Small Spacecraft Software Development, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

Previous work discussed critical differences in planning, developing hardware for and executing a high altitude balloon (HAB) mission. One area where this difference is less pronounced is in software development, allowing HABs to be utilized as a ‘software testbed’ for many orbital missions. This paper provides an overview of the software development process for both orbital and HAB craft, highlighting differences between the two processes and the numerous similarities. It concludes by presenting a framework for analyzing the suitability of HAB testing for small satellite software.

The Use Of 3d Printing To Enable High Altitude Balloon Missions, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

The 3D printing technology allows the low-cost creation of structures based on user-defined configuration parameters. Unlike other plastic-forming technologies, there is no tooling cost related to the creation of a mold. Because of this, highly-customized structures can be created with a minimum production quantity of one, allowing adaptation to individual mission needs (for a single-HAB mission) or the change of the structure across a multi-unit run (e.g., to test various configurations or as part of a study requiring multiple payloads with different configurations).

This paper considers the mission possibilities enabled by the use of 3D printing for HAB structures. These …