Toward space architecture resilience: a system-theoretic framework for analysis and design

As space-based systems have developed to provide numerous critical capabilities for defense applications, the systems designed to disrupt them have developed as well. Therefore, it is imperative to design, operate, and sustain space architectures for resilience. However, there are limited methodologies available which incorporate adversarial threats for the analysis and design of resilient space architectures. This paper recommends a System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) framework to qualitatively analyze space architectures and identify design considerations, requirements, and constraints required for resilience. The study demonstrates the analysis framework on a notional remote sensing architecture subjected to a set of adversarial threats. The resulting framework provides (1) a process to assess space architectures for loss scenarios involving adversary threats and (2) a process to determine system behavioral constraints and mitigations to ensure system resilience.