Interoperable space avionics needed for future lunar infrastructure, NASA official says
NewsSeptember 22, 2026
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland. Interoperable spaceflight computers built from standardized hardware could help NASA and its commercial partners meet the development schedules associated with future lunar infrastructure, a NASA official said during a panel at the 2026 MOSA Industry and Government Summit.
“We have a need to adopt these interoperability standards if we want to meet our objectives with Moonbase and Artemis,” said Christopher Green, capability lead for avionics and sensors at NASA. Habitats, rovers, and other lunar systems will require an avionics ecosystem that can be maintained and expanded without developing a bespoke computer for every mission, he said.
Green and the other panelists pointed to the Sensor Open Systems Architecture, or SOSA, Technical Standard Space Appendix as one way to apply a modular open systems approach (MOSA) to spaceflight avionics. The appendix builds on the SpaceVPX and VNX+ form factors while narrowing the available interface choices so that boards from different suppliers can communicate across a common backplane.
SpaceVPX by itself provides too many configuration options to ensure that independently developed products will interoperate, Green said. The SOSA effort is intended to define interfaces within the chassis, including the backplane and communications between single-board computers, power supplies, input/output devices, and mission-specific cards. It does not presently cover the entire spacecraft bus.
NASA is unlikely to prescribe a particular hardware standard for every commercial lunar system, Green said. Instead, the agency could ask contractors to apply MOSA principles and allow mission requirements and schedules to determine the implementation.
“I don’t think we’re going to tell them how to do it, or, ‘You have to use this,’” he said. However, when a contractor must produce a computing system for a launch 12 months away, an existing ecosystem of interoperable, commercially available components could make the choice more straightforward.
Nicholas Franconi, senior electrical engineer at Voyager Technologies, said standardized component interfaces are already reducing the engineering work needed to develop space-system proposals. Engineers can select cards from specification sheets with greater confidence that the resulting system will function together, rather than repeatedly determining whether individual products can communicate.
“For us, that is weeks of time,” Franconi said. The availability of radiation-tolerant components has also improved substantially over the past year, making the supplier ecosystem better able to support compressed development schedules, he added.
Panelists cautioned that standardized interfaces do not eliminate space qualification or system-level verification. Components still must contend with radiation, vacuum, shock, vibration, limited board area, and the difficulty of removing heat without convection. Integrators also remain responsible for testing the completed system even when suppliers provide environmental-test data for individual cards.
