Spacecraft Systems Engineering

In 1958, a small radiation detector rode an early satellite into orbit and came back with readings nobody had expected. What they revealed was not an instrument fault. It was a belt of charged particles, trapped by Earth's magnetic field, wrapped around the planet.

Every spacecraft built since has had to survive that environment, and the ones that fail to survive it usually fail quietly: a bit flipped in memory, a solar cell degraded a few percent per year, a surface eroded by atomic oxygen until its optical properties no longer match the thermal model.

None of those failures announce themselves. They are budgeted for, years before launch, or they are not survived.
This book teaches spacecraft systems engineering as a set of calculations you can perform yourself: fifty-two complete worked examples, each carried from stated assumptions through every intermediate step and unit to a checked final answer.

Sixteen chapters follow one continuous thread. A mission objective becomes a written requirement. The requirement becomes a budget of mass, power, and data. The budget is allocated to subsystems with margin. Every allocation is verified before the vehicle flies.

Inside the book:

• How to choose a shielding thickness against a total-dose requirement, and why shielding does comparatively little against the effects that flip a single bit
• What a spacecraft's thermal cycle count actually reaches over a six-year mission, and what that number does to a mechanism
• How to estimate end-of-life solar array power once radiation damage has been accounted for
• Why a spacecraft with eight subsystems that each meet their written specification can still fail its mission
• The full delta-v arithmetic behind a transfer to geostationary orbit, and the propellant mass it costs in kilograms
• How to close a radio link budget in decibels, and which term to change first when it will not close
• The one question to ask before adding a redundant unit