About SMD

Space Mission Designer, or SMD, is a browser-based platform for space mission design and system-level analysis. It brings orbital analysis, spacecraft modeling, ground station access, communications, power, and data budgets into a single workflow, allowing engineers to explore and iterate on mission concepts without switching between specialized tools.

SMD exists to remove friction from the early stages of mission design. Traditional aerospace engineering tools are powerful and highly capable, but they can be expensive, complex to configure, and difficult to integrate into a fast design workflow. SMD takes a different approach: there is nothing to install, no specialized workstation to configure, and no fragmented toolchain to manage. Open a browser, define a scenario, and start exploring.

SMD is built for the phase where mission concepts are still evolving and trade-offs matter most. It is not intended to replace high-fidelity engineering or operations tools. Instead, it makes system-level analysis faster and more accessible, enabling university CubeSat teams, startups, and aerospace engineers to evaluate many mission concepts in the time it would traditionally take to evaluate only a few.

Accessibility does not mean sacrificing engineering rigor. SMD's orbital propagation and access computations are continuously validated against established mission-analysis software, helping ensure that the results produced during early design are consistent with established aerospace analysis methods.