In the absence of the SPLASH database, experimenters—especially newcomers—face a highly fragmented and inefficient process for finding spaceflight hardware information:
- They must search through scattered NASA documentation (e.g., various ISS Payload Guides and other mission-specific files), which are often inconsistent or outdated, with vital information missing or spread across multiple PDFs and internal portals.
- Access to practical hardware knowledge heavily depends on personal contacts and former PIs, which introduces barriers to anyone outside those established networks.
- When evaluating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, researchers rely on vendor catalogs, yet these rarely provide necessary spaceflight-specific constraints. This means a product selected for its Earth specs can still fail in orbit or require late-stage modifications, increasing costs and risk.
- Parsing prior published spaceflight experiment papers is another method, but these rarely follow a metadata standard and usually lack engineering details or full calibration/configuration notes, thus impeding reproducibility and reuse.
Having complete, standardized metadata for spaceflight hardware is crucial in several ways:
- It makes robust replication and validation possible, since details like instrument model, calibration records, and configuration are vital for reproducing results or troubleshooting issues encountered post-launch.
- It directly impacts payload compatibility, safety reviews, and resource allocation. Detailed specs prevent resource conflicts, identify integration risks, and are needed for regulatory compliance and crew safety.
- When anomalies or failures occur, robust metadata allows rapid root-cause analysis and supports both correction and knowledge transfer for future missions.
Documented evidence exists that the lack of such central hardware metadata leads to wasted resources:
- Multiple examples from aerospace and CubeSat development show teams have needlessly repeated qualification testing of already-proven components, or “redesigned the wheel” due to missing or inaccessible hardware histories—even within NASA and ESA programs.
- Failure to properly document or share heritage hardware sometimes leads to costly interface and integration problems, or even mission delays and failures when historical data is not available at design time.
Existing repositories each have vital but incomplete solutions:
- SPASE and the NASA OSDR provide mature frameworks for metadata and data discovery in heliophysics and life science, but are focused on raw experimental data, not the hardware-level configuration and integration details that SPLASH will capture.
- NASA and ESA parts lists (NPSL, ESCIES) offer deep coverage of EEE components, but lack experiment-level integration, calibration, and operational context, which experimenters need to plan and validate real missions.