In a League of Its Own
By Scott Gourley
Often, one of the most critical elements in a space launch is the easiest to take for granted.
While the payload itself typically garners the most attention, it's the spacecraft bus that carries and supports every aspect of the mission for the life of that craft. And in the case of the James Webb Space Telescope, the bus performs its vital role with a robust and trusted design that sets a new standard for engineering creativity. The bus is really the ‘infrastructure’ of the observatory and consists of the ‘guts’ of the whole space-flying machine - the power, communications, attitude control and thermal control subsystems, and on-board computing power that are necessary to ‘fly’ the observatory.
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Lessons Learned for Future Spacecraft
Asked whether any aspects of Webb’s bus design process might be applicable to future spacecraft payloads, Abelson replied that some of the approaches would likely remain unique to this particular spacecraft bus mission.
"Some of the concepts, like using heat pipes as an isolator, worked for us," he said. "But it's also a little unusual. You typically would want something more structural to support things.” Abelson continued, “On all the work we do on an exquisite program like Webb, we take the learnings and innovation and apply those concepts to smaller, faster satellite and spacecraft projects.”
