Air Force Extends Plug-and-Play Spacecraft

coondoggie writes "Looking to build strategic satellites in days if need be, rather than months, the Air Force is pushing forward with what it calls plug-and-play spacecraft. This week it awarded a $500,000 order to Northrop Grumman to begin designing the plug-and-play spacecraft 'bus' which will offer standard interfaces for a variety of payload components, much like a laptop computer that immediately recognizes new hardware when it's plugged in, Northrop stated. The order was awarded under a contract that has a ceiling of $200 million."

Comments

this very same thinking

[siddesu]

is what got the aliens beaten by a macintosh and a loser like jeff goldblum. compile everything in, disable all dynamic modules!

Re:USB analogy is a big bogus

[blueg3]

In the existing space PnP spec, the devices are autonomously numbered. In fact, the existing space PnP spec is designed to run over either USB or the SpaceWire bus.

If you read the article, you'll note that the comparison with USB is that the devices provide other devices on the network with a description of the functions they support. So, the bus has multinode network communication over a single common protocol, power, autonomous numbering, and devices indicating their capabilities. That's USB, not IP.

Re:$500,000 or $200,000,000 ?! Which is it ?

[NigelBeamenIII]

It's a question of how government contracts are awarded. They typically will have at least two things for each contract: the amount of money on the contract and the contract ceiling. The amount on the contract is the amount the company actually has in their accounts to spend. the ceiling is more like a "credit limit" which says the maximum amount of money the AF *can* ever put on the contract. Hope that explanation helps some.

Re:Finally

[Nutria]

they need to do it with weapons systems across the board.

They do a lot of this already. That's what the Joint in JSTARS, JSF, JDAM, etc, etc means. Then there's the commonality of small arms, payroll systems, M1 tanks run on jet fuel, and so forth.

However, there are lots of reasons why much of their material can not be common: sea-borne, air and ground equipment all have different "sturdiness" requirements, there are different RADAR frequencies for different tasks and that means different antennae, etc.

A good example of why this sometimes can, but usually can't work was that when Robert McNamara was SECDEF. He made all the branches use the same kind of gun and buy the same kind of boots, and that was great. But he also made them build a "Joint Strike Fighter" (the TFX, later named the F-111), which turned out to be way too heavy for carrier operations.