Specific Challenge:
One of the main objectives of the Space strategy for Europe is to foster a globally competitive and innovative European space sector in particular by improving support to technological maturity, for sub-systems, equipment and technologies, including in-orbit demonstration and validation activities, to reduce time to market.
To ensure European non-dependence and competitiveness in technologies, there is a clear need for a regular, sustainable, cost-effective and responsive IOD/IOV service in Europe. Space flight heritage in real conditions and environment is often required to de-risk innovations such as new technologies, products, concepts, architectures, and operations techniques are they for unique or recurrent, institutional or commercial missions.
Although flight opportunities do exist, these are often difficult to find ad hoc at affordable cost and/or in the required timeframe, and at an acceptable risk for the main mission.
The main challenge of the overall IOD/IOV activities is to provide a regular and cost-effective solution for common flight ticket actions (management, spacecraft design and possible reuse for multiple mission, Assembly, integration and Tests, launch and operations) based on European solutions both for the spacecraft (i.e. platform and aggregate of experiments) and for the ground and launch services.
Concerning launch aspects, IOD/IOV shall support the European launcher exploitation policy, therefore relying on European manufactured launcher solutions.
The specific challenge of this activity is to provide solutions for the mission analysis, planning, design, experiments accommodation and implementation.
Scope:
In order to bring these innovations to maturity and market applicability, the activities shall comprise all the necessary tasks to prepare, provide and operate spacecraft(s), together with the related ground segment, which accommodates the pre-selected IOD/IOV experiments. The activities include:
Such an IOD/IOV service should be built on European solutions available for the spacecraft, ground segment and launch system.
The proposals will only consider those experiments which have already reached a sufficient TRL to proceed as IOD/IOV candidates.
The IOD/IOV actions are selected according to the process described in the technical guidance document published together with this work programme[1]. Accordingly, proposals shall only address the IOD/IOV actions presented in this guidance document and shall include the necessary engineering reviews, a contingency management plan and associated resources (roughly 10%) in line with the provisions of that document.
Selected projects resulting from SPACE-18-TEC-2019-2020 shall interface with ESA and the European Launch Service Provider in the context of their engineering support and launch services activities respectively on the basis of a collaboration agreement.
Expected Impact: