Evaluation of production models in large-scale satellite manufacturing

This paper proposes a method to assess how different production models can affect cost and value of a large-scale production of satellites intended to be deployed in an Earth-orbiting constellation. The study aims at finding the most appropriate production models for different satellite typologies and constellation architectures. For example, whereas in the production of satellites of large size each spacecraft subsystem must be assigned to a dedicated production unit, in the production of micro and nano satellites such a scheme for the manufacturing process can be extremely inefficient or (in case of highly-integrated designs) it can even make no sense. The proposed method, on the basis of some key-characteristics of the spacecraft design and of the constellation architecture, evaluates cost and value metrics for the production and testing activities, and aims at identifying the most efficient trade-offs in the organization of the manufacturing process. Unit-dedicated cellular workstations, and -at the opposite- a single product-assembly-line can be considered the two extremes in the organization of the manufacturing process: in the middle of these two, a number of crossbreed configurations can be considered to find the most appropriate production method according to the intended satellite typology and the given constellation architecture.