Spacecraft Design Decisions and International Space Security
Monday, June 10, 201312:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific)
A central dilemma persists for national space actors: satellites are critical to economic, scientific, and national security activities, but spacecraft are vulnerable to malfunction, environmental failure, and hostile disruptions. 'Distributed satellite' mission approaches may provide a means to supplement the security of certain satellite systems by increasing both redundancy and physical dispersion. But how do national leaders make decisions between satellite architectures given these overall risks and unknown development costs? This talk will review some current context in American space programs and present a formal model based on parallel Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for analysis of satellite architecture decisions.
About the speaker: Matt Daniels is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University and an engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center. Matt's research focuses on developing probabilistic risk models to assess the viability of constellations of small, networked satellite modules for scientific and national security missions. His doctoral research aims to improve designs for new space systems.
Matt has worked at NASA Ames since 2008, where he is an engineer in the Mission Design Center and works with the Office of the Director on international technical collaborations. At NASA he has helped create NASA-DARPA partnerships on new space projects and has been a member of NASA delegations to Europe, South America, and the Middle East. As an undergraduate, Matt worked at NASA Ames, NASA Headquarters, and the Department of State. Matt received his M.S. from Stanford University in aeronautics & astronautics, and his B.A. from Cornell University in physics and international relations.