Data-Oriented Modeling for Spacecraft Design
This addresses the problem of integrating complex Model-Based Systems Engineering tools for spacecraft designers, though it appears incremental by adapting an existing architecture from another industry.
The paper tackled the high costs and complexity in spacecraft design by proposing a data-oriented approach based on the Entity-Component-System architecture from video games, resulting in reduced deployment complexity, simplified testing, and preserved traceability for an example interplanetary mission concept.
Spacecraft development costs remain high despite falling launch costs, in part because Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools carry the complexity of the object-oriented programming paradigm: tightly coupled data and logic, mutable state, and rigid class hierarchies that resist integration with discipline-specific analysis tools. This paper presents a data-oriented approach to MBSE that adapts the Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture from the video game industry. Design data is stored as immutable, format-agnostic components in a generic data system; stateless analysis functions operate on this data through templates and containerized tools within a continuous integration pipeline. A prototype implementation, VVERDAD (https://github.com/VisVivaSpace/vverdad-prototype), demonstrates the approach on an example interplanetary mission concept, showing how data-oriented principles can reduce deployment complexity, simplify testing, and preserve the traceability benefits of document-based systems engineering.