2018.B.3.1. ECLIPSE – Professional PM Toolset for Academia Led CubeSat Projects

Author(s)

Dennis Roshal (1)

Sapienza Consulting, The Netherlands

Session

B.3

Keywords

Space Project, Project Management, Configuration Management, ECSS Standards, ECLIPSE, Sapienza Consulting, CubeSat

Abstract

Academia led CubeSat programmes often take risks in the product realisation and business areas of their space project, paying limited attention to important aspects such as Project Management, Product Assurance, Configuration Management, Quality Assurance and Data Management. This is usually due to the small scale of the operation and the drive for cost minimization, which often precludes the purchase and use of dedicated professional software tools.

With ECLIPSE for academia, Sapienza aims to collaborate with CubeSat programmes and offer an integrated, modular and scalable suite of applications that can be used during their projects end-to-end. The value lies in eliminating the need for several detached tools, which are not tailored for space project management processes, require constant maintenance and tend to become knowledge silos that significantly hinder efficiency. Moreover, the introduction of ECLIPSE within a CubeSat programme gives the students a unique opportunity to work with industry standard software in a learning/live environment.

ECLIPSE is widely used throughout the space sector by organisations ranging from international agencies (ESA), industry primes (OHB, Airbus, Thales) and SMEs (QinetiQ, IberEspacio). In fact, ECLIPSE is the only space-oriented web-based toolset providing an answer to the multifaceted needs of the PA-QA-DM and PM office in space projects. The suite was built on the back of the success of applications employed by all ESA projects and originally designed by Sapienza.

Through collaboration with academia-led CubeSat projects, Sapienza strives to learn more about CubeSat projects and businesses and anticipate their market needs. Evaluating structured feedback received from students and academic staff will provide us with invaluable input for future improvements and evolution of the tools. In return, the academia will be able to use ECLIPSE in their CubeSat programmes free of charge with an educational license. We believe in this form of mutual value creation, based on initial contact and positive feedback from several universities around the world that were facing the challenges described above.

Adherence to common standards and effective management throughout a distributed project team in a small-scale space operation is difficult to achieve without the appropriate tools. With ECLIPSE, Sapienza makes this a possibility and wishes to build a CubeSat community using the tool that can benefit from it and influence its evolution through feedback. With this initiative we also aim to empower the new generation of engineers to face the professional challenges of tomorrow.