The various U. S. government agencies that are pursuing in-space assembly technology have a common need to demonstrate technological capabilities on a space-based platform. Several of the agencies, and different mission developers within an agency, have independently begun planning such demonstrations. This paper reports on a study of how well the different planned platforms could support demonstrations of the agencies' joint needs. The study first prioritized a comprehensive list of the needs for in-space assembly capabilities across the agencies against jointly agreed evaluation criteria. Each planned demonstration platform was characterized to a first order. The capability needs were qualitatively assessed against four figures of merit including their joint priority, and the platforms were assessed against five criteria to produce a quantitative weighting factor of reach capability need and each platform. A Quality Function Deployment (QFD) matrix was used to deploy the weighted capability needs against the weighted platforms capabilities. This first-order assessment showed that the platforms reflect a great deal of redundant capability without a strong reason to prefer one over the others. These results were largely insensitive to the details of the assumptions. I.Introduction A. BackgroundThe space-faring agencies of the US government formed a Space Science and Technology (S&T) Partnership Forum to explore key, pervasive, and game-changing space technology development efforts of common interest in the hope of making more efficient use of government resources.

In-space assembly (ISA), the ability to build structures in space, has the potential to enable or support a wide range of advanced mission capabilities. Many different individual assembly technologies would be needed in different combinations to serve many mission concepts. The many-to-many relationship between mission needs and technologies makes it difficult to determine exactly which specific technologies should receive priority for development and demonstration. Furthermore, because enabling technologies are still immature, no realistic, near-term design reference mission has been described that would form the basis for flowing down requirements for such development and demonstration. This broad applicability without a single, well-articulated mission makes it difficult to advance the technology all the way to flight readiness. This paper reports on a study that prioritized individual technologies across a broad field of possible missions to determine priority for future technology investment.

Better knowledge of the atmosphere, ocean and land are needed by a wide range of users spanning the scientific, civil and defense communities. Observations to provide this knowledge will require aerial systems with greater operational flexibility and lower life-cycle costs than are currently available. Persistent monitoring of severe storms, sampling and measurements of the Earth's carbon cycle, wildfire monitoring/management, crop assessments, ozone and polar ice changes, and natural disaster response (communications and surveillance) are but a few applications where autonomous aerial observations can effectively augment existing measurement systems. User driven capabilities include high altitude, long range, long-loiter (days/weeks), smaller deployable sensor-ships for in-situ sampling, and sensors providing data with spectral bandwidth and high temporal and three-dimensional spatial resolution. Starting with user needs and considering all elements and activities required to acquire the needed observations leads to the definition of autonomous aerial observation systems (AAOS) that can significantly complement and extend the current Earth observation capability. In this approach, UAVs are viewed as only one, albeit important, element in a mission system and overall cost and performance for the user are the critical success factors. To better understand and meet the challenges of developing such AAOSs, a systems oriented multi-dimensional analysis has been performed that illuminates the enabling and high payoff investments that best address the needs of scientific, civil, and defense users of Earth observations. The analysis further identifies technology gaps and serves to illustrate how investments in a range of mission subsystems together can enable a new class of Earth observations.

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