Fundamentals of Spacecraft Systems Engineering: Designing, Building, and Operating Satellites from Concept to Orbit

Once a spacecraft separates from its launch vehicle, there is no service truck, no warranty return, and no on-site repair. Every design decision made on the ground has to survive years of vacuum, radiation, and thermal extremes with no second chance — which is why spacecraft engineering is taught and practiced as a systems discipline, not a collection of independent specialties. Many engineers and students preparing for this field run into the same wall: the available references split the subject into isolated silos — orbital mechanics in one book, propulsion in another, attitude control somewhere else — with little guidance on how a decision in one subsystem steals mass, power, or schedule margin from every other. Several classic texts were also written before routine reusable launch, electric propulsion as a default choice, and constellations numbering in the thousands became normal, leaving a gap between what is taught and how missions are actually built today. This engineering text closes that gap with a single, continuously built reference spanning the full spacecraft bus. Organized into eighteen self-contained chapters across four parts, it starts with the physics every subsystem depends on, works systematically through propulsion, launch vehicle selection, structures, attitude control, electrical power, thermal control, telecommunications, data handling, ground operations, and mechanisms, then closes with the cross-cutting disciplines that determine whether a design is trustworthy and current: electromagnetic compatibility, reliability engineering, orbital-debris compliance, and small-satellite and constellation-scale economics. Every chapter derives its theory from first principles and works through fully solved numerical examples before closing with practice problems and a complete answer key. The capstone is a full requirements flow-down exercise that carries one mission objective statement down to subsystem-level requirements and a verification plan, showing how every method in the book fits together on an actual design problem. Design lessons are drawn throughout from real, documented engineering case studies, including a landmark antenna deployment anomaly and orbital collision events that reshaped current debris-mitigation policy. Readers who work through this book will be able to: • Analyze a spacecraft as an integrated system of mass, power, thermal, cost, and schedule trades rather than a set of independently optimized parts. • Select and justify an orbit for a given mission class, then size a chemical or electric propulsion system against its delta-v budget. • Design and evaluate attitude determination and control, electrical power, thermal control, and telecommunications subsystems using first-principles methods. • Carry a mission requirement from a one-paragraph objective statement down through subsystem requirements to a verification plan. • Apply reliability, electromagnetic compatibility, and orbital-debris compliance thinking as integral parts of the design rather than late-stage add-ons. This book is written for upper-level engineering students and early-career engineers with a foundation in calculus, physics, and engineering mechanics, as well as practicing engineers moving into satellite programs from an adjacent discipline. No prior spacecraft-specific coursework is assumed, and every chapter stands on its own as a course text or a standing reference. Get your copy and start building a systems-level command of spacecraft design, from the physics that governs every mission to the practical disciplines that keep it flying.