Modularization

Abstract

This quote is from a blog article [Jain15] by Naveen Jain, one of the three founders of the Florida-based private company Moon Express Inc., which was founded in 2010. The business objective of Moon Express (MoonEx) is to mine natural resources of economic value, such as ore, on the moon. For this purpose, MoonEx engineers designed a family of flexible and scalable robotic explorers based on modular spacecraft architecture. The foundation for their modular architecture is NASA's Modular Common Spacecraft Bus (MCSB), which is a general-purpose spacecraft platform that can be configured as landers or orbiters. The MCSB not only reduces costs; NASA states that an uncrewed space mission that is built on the MCSB platform is roughly one-tenth the price of a conventional mission. Furthermore, by using a modular platform, NASA will no longer "reinvent the wheel," by being able to reuse many components.