In the last years, electric propulsion has become an interesting alternative to the traditional chemical propulsion for different applications, ranging from transfers to GEO to operations of (large) constellations of small satellites in LEO.The activity will first look at available data on flown hardware and their performance, together with a review of currently adopted operational concepts.

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The ambitious goal to fully apply Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) in future projects and to establish the methodology across ESA missions, engineering domains, customer-supplier boundaries and lifecycle phases demands that the entire lifecycle is addressed. This includes - among others - procurement, operations and the transition of engineering model data from Phase 0/A through to Phase E. For instance, the utilisation of digital system engineering data or models upon handover to the operator is limited and based on documents or static database artefacts.

The presence of autonomous software systems as well as artificial intelligence components in onboard software is becoming increasingly widespread in space missions. As autonomous software is finding its way into more and more missions, having a unified approach for the product assurance of this type of software that can be made applicable across projects is essential.Many of the software product assurance requirements currently in place for space missions could be impacted by autonomous software, from fundamental topics like criticality analysis, down to detailed software quality metrics.

Currently extensive mission preparation / mission customisation ("missionisation") activities are required for each specific launch trajectory. This approach is costly and each launch can take place only within a narrow set of conditions (e.g. wind) risking postponement, increasing cost even further. Using a more aircraft like approach with guidance and control preparation according to flight envelope not per trajectory, while increasing operational availability and safety early in the development process is essential to achieve the benefits of recurrent space transportation flight.

In 50 years of Space Exploration, the total distance covered by rovers on Mars and the Moon is about 200km, an average of 4km per year. Future exploration rovers are expected to travel one or two orders of magnitude more.This requires designing rovers that are intrinsically faster than what has been built so far.