Fractionated spacecraft

[4] Molette's, and later analyses by Rooney,[5] concluded that the benefits of fractionated spacecraft were outweighed by their higher mass and cost.

By 2006, Brown and his collaborators[3][6] claim that the option value of flexibility, the insurance value of improved robustness, and mass production effects will exceed any penalties, and make an analogy with distributed clusters of personal computers (PCs) which are overtaking supercomputers.

[7] In 2007, DARPA, the Pentagon's advanced technology organization, issued an announcement[8] soliciting proposals for a program entitled System F6, which aims to prove "the feasibility and benefits" of a fractionated satellite architecture through a space demonstration.

The program appears to emphasize wireless networking as a critical technical enabler, along with econometric modeling to assess[clarification needed] if and when the architecture is advantageous over conventional approaches [9] DARPA called for open-source development of the networking and communications protocols and interfaces for the fractionated spacecraft modules.

In 2008, DARPA announced that contracts for the preliminary development phase of the System F6 program were issued to teams headed by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Orbital Sciences.