Designing Space Missions for 2020 and Beyond
ESA TV Exchanges
Space missions take many years and numerous tests to find their way from the drawing board to the launch pad. This puts a high potential price tag on wrong decisions made during the design phase.
Concurrent design is a successful method for designing completely new space missions with an eye on minimum risk, which ESA has perfected inside a futuristic hi-tech faciltiy at its Technical Centre ESTEC.
These days, the Concurrent Design Facility completed its 50th study, reason enough to present the methods and the key players in a TV Exchange to a greater audience.
The script is online as a PDF file under http://television.esa.int/photos/EbS45533.pdf
A Quicktime 7 preview clip is online under http://esatv-movies.e-vision.nl/videos/m4w/Concurrent_Design_Facility.mp4 (22.5 MB)

The Concurrent Design Facility
TC 10.00.40 Begin of A-roll
(GVs asteroid on collision course with earth simulation) An asteroid is threatening the Earth. The menace is real and a rapid response required. At the European Space Agencyís Concurrent Design Facility in the Netherlands, engineers have found a solution: hit the asteroid with a projectile, slightly altering its trajectory, just enough to avoid disaster: this is ESAís Don Quixote mission.,
(Set-ups Massimo Bandecchi) This may be just an exercise, and the spacecraft mock-ups, but it illustrates some of the work of the Concurrent Design Facility, or CDF for short. Massimo Bandecchi runs the CDF, focusing on pre-industrial and conceptual design studies for future space missions. Some of these will one day become reality.
SOT Massimo Bandecchi, CDF Manager ""We are now working on preparing missions that will be launched in 2030 and beyond. We are planning to make missions that will bring men on mars, but it will take a long de