Space solar-power satellites may one day transmit large amounts of high-powered microwave beams to Earth from geostationary Earth orbit. New spacecraft can be designed to prosper from this new available source of energy by equipping future spacecraft with a rectenna array or hybrid photovoltaic/rectenna array system. This idea offers prospective benefits, such as extending the mission lifetime of the spacecraft through increasing the life of the power generation function and reducing the power generation units mass. This paper explores the integration of rectenna array and hybrid photovoltaic/rectenna array systems into future spacecraft and compares this method to the conventional photovoltaic array method, considering mission and component life, mass, area, and energy harvesting capabilities. Cost is compared between conventional photovoltaic array and the rectenna array. This paper shows that the integrated hybrid photovoltaic/rectenna array power generation unit seems a viable option in obtaining the aforementioned benefits in the case of a retrodirective beam scenario. A power irradiance map is provided, based on former space solar-power satellites reference systems, that shows what lower orbiting satellites could experience from a microwave power beam delivered to Earth if future geostationary-Earth-orbit space solar-power satellites are operational.

This paper discusses the use of the system-of-systems (SoS) methodology and SoS engineering (SoSE) to the challenge of the design and operation of a CubeSat-class spacecraft. It considers this in the context of one critical component system, the electrical power system (EPS) which interacts with virtually all other systems onboard the spacecraft. The spacecraft is also considered in the context of being a system-component of a larger mission system-of-systems. The efficacy of SoSE use for this endeavor is considered and recommendations are made for the use of SoS and SoSE by other small spacecraft and, more broadly, spacecraft developers.