TY  - JOUR
AU  - Xu, Chenglong
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/25
TI  - Why Large Spacecraft Swarms Will Be Maintained Primarily by Design, Not Solely by Control
JO  - Aerospace Engineering Communications
T2  - Aerospace Engineering Communications
JF  - Aerospace Engineering Communications
VL  - 1
IS  - 2
SP  - 87
EP  - 92
DO  - 10.62762/AEC.2026.392649
UR  - https://www.icck.org/article/abs/AEC.2026.392649
KW  - spacecraft swarms
KW  - maintenance
KW  - passive safety
KW  - configuration design
KW  - formation flying
AB  - As orbital swarms grow toward populations of tens to hundreds, long-term maintenance changes character. We argue that it is distinct from reconfiguration or trajectory planning, defined by two requirements: it is perpetual, and it must be low-frequency, because every active maneuver arc is stolen from the payload's working time. Against these requirements the three dominant paradigms: centralized planning, distributed reactive control, and configuration design-then-maintain, fail in qualitatively different ways. Two of these failures are structural, properties of how the problem is posed; only the third is fixable. We therefore contend that scalable swarm maintenance will be achieved primarily by design rather than by control alone, provided the design phase is reformulated to treat deployment cost and extensibility as first-class objectives. We close on the resulting open question: how to lift safety from a pairwise to a collective property so that its cost stops growing with the number of pairs.
SN  - 3071-1967
PB  - Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge
LA  - English
ER  - 

@article{Xu2026Why,
  author = {Chenglong Xu},
  title = {Why Large Spacecraft Swarms Will Be Maintained Primarily by Design, Not Solely by Control},
  journal = {Aerospace Engineering Communications},
  year = {2026},
  volume = {1},
  number = {2},
  pages = {87-92},
  doi = {10.62762/AEC.2026.392649},
  url = {https://www.icck.org/article/abs/AEC.2026.392649},
  abstract = {As orbital swarms grow toward populations of tens to hundreds, long-term maintenance changes character. We argue that it is distinct from reconfiguration or trajectory planning, defined by two requirements: it is perpetual, and it must be low-frequency, because every active maneuver arc is stolen from the payload's working time. Against these requirements the three dominant paradigms: centralized planning, distributed reactive control, and configuration design-then-maintain, fail in qualitatively different ways. Two of these failures are structural, properties of how the problem is posed; only the third is fixable. We therefore contend that scalable swarm maintenance will be achieved primarily by design rather than by control alone, provided the design phase is reformulated to treat deployment cost and extensibility as first-class objectives. We close on the resulting open question: how to lift safety from a pairwise to a collective property so that its cost stops growing with the number of pairs.},
  keywords = {spacecraft swarms, maintenance, passive safety, configuration design, formation flying},
  issn = {3071-1967},
  publisher = {Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge}
}