Is your simulation stack actually de-risking your mission - or just checking a box?

When you ask a GNC engineer if they can build a satellite SITL (Software In The Loop) simulation, the answer is usually "Sure." They’ve built the physics in Matlab/Simulink and integrated with some open-source simulation framework.

​

The Reality Check: A synchronous Matlab/Simulink environment is a "perfect world." Space is not!

​​

To truly de-risk a mission, your simulation must expose the "unpleasant truths" of the system: real-time delays, asynchronous threading, and hardware-level ICD emulation.

 

In addition, If your simulation uses the same physics models as your flight software (FSW) algorithms, you aren't de-risking - you may be just repeating the same mistakes twice and delaying the "fatal error" until you're already in orbit.

​

How mature is your de-risking strategy?