IODISPLay: Capturing European needs and capabilities for in-orbit demonstration of space technologies

Current In-Orbit Demonstration (IOD) possibilities are restricted to either the identification of carriers of opportunity (where IOD has to fulfill with fixed requirements and interfaces, limited to a top-down approach) or to dedicated missions where a satellite is designed as a compromise among the needs of a number of identified technologies to be demonstrated in orbit. Moreover, often political choices drive the selection of the technologies to be validated in orbit, sometimes at the expenses of more interesting technologies in terms of innovation, time-to-market and future mission or industrial application. On the one hand, this approach strongly limits the maximum available potential of IOD. On the other hand, current trends in modular satellites, the now dynamic panorama of space launchers and innovative concepts certainly offer new and extended possibilities for IOD.We believe that the optimum approach to build IOD missions shall consistently investigate and merge both the bottom-up and the top-down directions, i.e. on the one hand there must be a clear and extensive assessment exercise of the current and future technologies candidate for IOD and, on the other hand, a thorough identification exercise of IOD carriers and launcher services. This shall then drive the selection of IOD missions to be implemented at European level.This paper will then present the results of a European-wide survey on current needs and capabilities for IOD, as well as the software tool that has been prepared in order to use such information on technologies, launchers and carriers in order to identify IOD missions. Also, this paper will describe the results of an analysis of the potential market of a commercial IOD service at European level, identifying the supply and the demand for such service (including the willingness to pay). The activities described in this paper are part of the IODISPLay project which has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 640253.