A cluster of subsystem research, spanning radiation- and heat-tolerant components, low-SWaP onboard computing and signal processing, distributed satellite sensing and autonomy assurance, that together defines how far aerospace and defence platforms are shifting from single large assets to many small, hardened, partly autonomous ones.
Summary
“Aerospace and defence” as represented in these sources is not one technology but the engineering base underneath space access and contested-environment systems. Three strands recur. First, materials and components that survive environments no commercial part is designed for: an aluminium nitride ultra-wide-bandgap photodetector that stays linear under blue light above 40 W/cm² and at temperatures to at least 300 °C; ultrafine-grained AA6061 whose deployment depends on resisting recrystallisation near the ~200 °C that aluminium components can reach in low Earth orbit under solar irradiation; cobalt-free CrMnFeNi high-entropy alloys aimed at radiation-tolerant structures; and variable-emissivity coatings intended to replace mechanical louvers on lunar habitats, where moving parts must survive dust contamination.
Second, doing more computation and sensing per watt and per kilogram. FPGAs are the focus for onboard neural inference because of flexibility, cost and radiation-tolerance potential. A lightweight classifier for onboard Earth observation reaches over 94% on EuroSAT and over 98% on PatternNet against 99% for MobileViT, but with 33x fewer parameters, 27x fewer FLOPs, roughly 6x lower power and about 3x faster inference, and runs at 852.30 mW on neuromorphic hardware. On the RF side, sparse digital pre-distortion cuts complexity by 2.77x with near-identical linearisation, addressing the same size, weight and power ceiling. Photonic integrated circuits are proposed to replace a telescope’s large aperture with an array of small apertures combined interferometrically, precisely because weight and size dominate space mission design.
The parameters that decide the field, as these sources frame it, are: performance per watt and per kilogram under fixed SWaP budgets; survivability against a named environment (radiation, atomic oxygen, thermal cycling, dust); the number of platforms needed before a distributed architecture beats a monolithic one; and whether autonomy and authentication can be verified rather than asserted.
Evidence base
Open questions
Assessment drafted 2026-08-31 from up to 18 KB sources using the technology-scorecard framework; scores are a draft read pending review.