This course is available with a live instructor
onsite or through a virtual platform.
NEW: This course is also available on-demand, working at your own pace.
Space projects often succeed—or fail—because of a small number of early design decisions. Those decisions are frequently made when information is incomplete, options are still open, and trade-offs are poorly understood. The Designing Space Missions and Systems (DSM) course prepares you to navigate that moment—when ambition meets reality.
Space missions are fundamentally constrained by the laws of physics and the state of the technology. This course focuses on how those constraints shape mission and system design, and how disciplined systems engineering translates mission needs into coherent, buildable architectures. You’ll learn how early choices about mission concepts, architectures, and trades propagate into cost, schedule, performance, risk, and operational complexity—often in irreversible ways.
Using a structured, practical approach, the course begins with mission needs and objectives and walks through early system definition, requirements development, Concept of Operations, architecture formulation, and trade-space analysis. These decisions are then traced forward into payload design, spacecraft sizing, subsystem definition, verification, and mission operations to show how architecture choices ripple across a program.
You’ll examine a realistic end-to-end case study that applies the tools and techniques learned in the course to develop a complete space mission. Experiential learning through hands-on exercises, together with lessons learned from historical missions, enable you to directly implement what you learned in your own projects. Are you defining mission concepts and architectures? Are you weighing payload, orbit, and system trade-offs? Are you supporting space mission or system design decisions that will shape a program for years to come? This course is designed for mission, system, and discipline engineers, ;principal investigators, and project managers who need to make—and defend—those decisions with confidence.
At the end of this course you will be able to apply the space mission analysis and design processes, principles, tools and techniques to develop a viable mission concept by:
✦ Defining high level mission goals and objectives
✦ Deriving system and subsystem requirements
✦ Identifying design solution options and drivers
✦ Applying design trade-off tools, techniques and methodologies to select specific solution options
✦ Describing the wider impact of design solutions across the rest of the mission architecture
(cost, schedule, risk, integration and test, launch, and operations)
✦ Module 1: Space Systems Engineering and Mission Design
• Introduction to Applied Space Systems Engineering
• Designing Space Missions
✦ Module 2: Mission Constraints and Enablers
• Space Environment
• Orbit Design and Applications
• Launch System Services
• Technical Risk Management and TRL
• Digital Engineering Tools and Techniques
✦ Module 3: Spacecraft Design
• Payloads
• Spacecraft Architecture
• Spaceflight Software
✦ Module 4: Subsystem Design
• EPS
• ADCS/GNC
• Propulsion
• Comm
• Thermal Control
• Structures and Configuration
✦ Module 5: Mission and System Implementation
• Quality/Product Assurance and Standards
• Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV)
• Mission Operations and Ground Systems
• Cost and Schedule Modeling
✦ Threaded case study throughout
Each participant will receive:
• A complete set of course notes with copies of all slides used in the presentation
• An e-copy of the Space Mission Analysis & Design-CORE textbook (not included with on-demand course)
Digital badges are web-enabled versions of a credential or certification which can be verified online.
Click here
for eligibility and request process.
