Engineering notes

Flight Software · 2026-08-26

Flight software V&V before a satellite launch

A practical walk through requirements traceability, MIL/SIL/HIL testing, and fault injection for satellite flight software before launch.

Read · 6 min Flight Software · 2026-08-26

GNC design for small satellites

The sensing and actuation chain, ADCS modes, and the pointing-budget trade-offs that shape every CubeSat-class GNC design.

Read · 8 min Flight Software · 2026-08-02

Certification evidence is a data problem before it is a paperwork problem

Programmes rarely fail on the engineering. They run out of schedule assembling the argument that the engineering was done, and that is a different problem with a different fix.

Read · 8 min Flight Software · 2026-07-30

Coordinate frames, and the bug that survives every code review

Every line is individually correct and the program is still wrong. Three floats carry no record of what they were measured against, so there is nothing for a reviewer to look at.

Read · 9 min Design & Analysis · 2026-07-15

A requirement you cannot test is a decoration

Most aerospace requirement sets contain a quiet majority that no one can verify. They survive review because nobody asks the only question that matters.

Read · 8 min Simulation & Training · 2026-07-08

Monte Carlo dispersions, and the false comfort of a big N

Ten thousand runs is not evidence of anything if the dispersions were guessed. What matters is which inputs were varied, and whether the tails were sampled at all.

Read · 8 min Ground Segment · 2026-06-24

The link budget is a schedule risk before it is a radio problem

Command and telemetry links get sized late, by specialists, against optimistic assumptions. The consequences land on the operations concept.

Read · 7 min Design & Analysis · 2026-06-18

The mass closure loop, and why conceptual designs stall

Conceptual aircraft sizing is a circular problem. Understanding why it converges, or fails to, is the difference between a design that closes and one that quietly does not.

Read · 8 min Simulation & Training · 2026-05-27

Everyone has SITL. Almost nobody uses it as a test harness

Software-in-the-loop simulation is free, widely available and mostly used as a sanity check. Treating it as a regression suite changes what it is worth.

Read · 7 min Data & Analytics · 2026-04-30

What flight data tells you before a component fails

Airlines have monitored flight data for decades. Small operators generate the same signals and almost never look at them.

Read · 6 min Platform · 2026-03-19

The seam between design and operations

Design tools do not know what flew. Operations tools do not know what was designed. Almost every aerospace software stack breaks at that boundary.

Read · 7 min