Tailoring of development and verification activities for an in-orbit technology demonstration CubeSat

Over the past two decades, CubeSats have emerged as a viable and competitive alternative for accessing space, compared to classical, monolithic satellite designs. Initially conceived as relatively affordable way for universities to access space, mainly for academic and research objectives, CubeSats have shown growing potential as versatile platforms for various purposes, such as Earth observation and in-orbit technology demonstration. Their relatively low cost and fast time of delivery have attracted the interest of not only universities, but also governmental agencies and commercial companies. Over time, it became clear that it was neither efficient nor effective to treat CubeSats as "scaled down" version of larger satellites: instead, tailored methodologies for satellite design and verification were developed, often preferring agile and less restrictive solutions over traditional document-heavy approaches. The main goal of this thesis is to formally document some of the tailored methodologies and processes developed for CubeSat design, development and verification, and to investigate how to implement them in the feasibility analysis of a real-life case study: the in-orbit technology demonstration CubeSat project DELETE, which, at the time of this thesis' publication, is being developed at Thales Alenia Space Italia, one of the major players in the European space sector. With reference to the case study, this thesis describes the work carried out on aspects of the project such as the definition of the model philosophy and hardware matrix, the verification approach, the test flow and test matrix, and the estimated costs and schedule and for the project. Another point of interest of this thesis is to create a bridge between academia and industry: in particular, to investigate how the innovative and agile solutions developed in academia, specifically within the context of Politecnico di Torino, can be adapted to fit into an industrial setting; and, vice versa, how the technical expertise and best practices coming from industry can be used to enhance the robustness of the methodologies developed within academia. As will be shown by the end of thesis, implementing an agile and tailored approach to the development of CubeSat projects can have a positive impact in terms of both costs and schedule for the entire project.