CSD&M 2026

A space observatory is scoped around optics, instruments, and spacecraft, but much of its mission lies in a digital enterprise realized in the operational phase. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has run that enterprise for NASA’s flagships for over three decades: Hubble, JWST, Roman, and early digital engineering groundwork for the pre-formulation Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). Three operational observatories, three Science Operations Centers (SOCs), one institution. SOC frontends span proposal selection, observation planning, scheduling, commanding, and operations; backends, telemetry processing, calibration, archiving, distribution, and analysis. Across industry and government, these common ground segment capabilities could form an implicit multi-mission product line, yet much of the architectural rationale, operational knowledge, and implementation experience remains program-specific and difficult to reuse across missions. 
Digital Engineering has advanced on two fronts: 1) methodology, formal semantics, shared data models, and exchange standards (CESAM, ARCADIA, RFLP, space ontologies, Domain Model Libraries, etc.); 2) execution, traceability, and operational evidence. Continuity requires both, yet they rarely converge in one program. The goal is a federated foundation able to sustain digital continuity across agencies, disciplines, lifecycles, and standardized partner interfaces. We want our models to work together but are not interested in dictating one solution or tool. 
So treated, the ground segment becomes a reusable, configurable, extensible platform with open interfaces, integrated analysis, continuous verification, and governed data exchange, surfacing mission knowledge via multi-mission inheritance. SysML v2 and standard APIs let instantiated, heterogeneous methods and tools feed one versioned, queryable architecture linked to requirements, software, simulation, analyses, decisions, and verification evidence. Grounded in that technical context and traceable sources, AI can recover and apply legacy knowledge rather than generate unsupported answers. The talk closes by examining three strategic choices facing agency leadership: whether architecture should be funded as a mission artifact or a multi-mission asset; whether review gates should prioritize demonstrated evidence coverage over model completeness; and whether interoperability should be achieved through common methods or common semantics.