Modern Early-Phase Digital Ecosystem to Enable Space Mission Engineering

This paper is one of several in a special session on Dyreqt, a framework built up over the past ten years at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) for the multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization (MDAO) of space system architectures. Mission engineering is a nascent, holistic, digitally-native approach to engineering future missions. To realize such an undertaking for space exploration, we identify some challenges: configuration management of fractal-like, recursive structures of the system-of-systems (SoS) definition --- especially in the early-phases of architecting activities of space SoS --- presents significant challenges. We address these challenges by infusing advances from software engineering and modern digital technologies, adopting composable architectures and a supporting digital infrastructure that equip architects with modern, scalable tools. This paper presents a subset of the digital engineering ecosystem developed at NASA MSFC's Advanced Concepts Office and its role in the broader mission engineering environment. The ecosystem delivers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions centered around the Dyreqt modelling framework, realizing reproducibility, configuration management, consistent use of version-controlled model libraries, and many advances from software engineering. We also describe our approach of reusable, composable model libraries and we introduce a web-based SaaS application to improve early-phase concurrent engineering activities that allows architects to interact with a graphical domain-specific language (DSL), including automatically transforming it into Dyreqt's DSL for execution. Together, these technologies advance key digital engineering tenets: authoritative sources of truth, model consistency, and enhanced interdisciplinary communication. This new ecosystem has supported numerous studies, demonstrating its effectiveness in accelerating conceptual design and supporting broader mission engineering capabilities.