Conservatism and innovation in spacecraft design Options

[Doug M.]

Would it be fair to say that we're in the middle of a fairly conservative period with regard to spacecraft design? By this I mean that we haven't seen major innovations in propulsion, communications, power sources, shielding or avionics in the last decade, and we're not expecting to see major innovations in these areas in the next ten years. We are seeing a lot of ongoing advances in mission design, in payload, and in instrumentation. But the spacecraft themselves are changing much more slowly, and their design is increasingly dominated by heritage technologies.

Would this be a broadly true statement, or is there actually a lot of significant innovation in these areas that's going underreported? I'm sincerely curious.


Doug M.