Inside Redwire’s Chantilly, Va., office, Chris Massa works alongside other Redwire engineers in Shadow Lab, an immersive digital engineering workspace that showcases mission-critical technologies.

Built for internal collaboration and as a demonstration space for customers coming to the D.C. area office, Shadow Lab enables digital modeling and simulation of Redwire’s capabilities and solutions in realistic mission scenarios to support Redwire’s growing national security, civil, and commercial space portfolios.

Digital engineering is crucial for modeling, simulating and analyzing complex space systems, driven by government mandates like DoDI 5000.97, which calls for the adoption of modern digital practices across the entire lifecycle of defense acquisition programs.

Redwire\’s Digital Ecosystem for Mission and System Integration (DEMSI) digital engineering environment combines best-in-class commercially available system and domain engineering tools with Redwire’s proprietary Agent-based Configurable Open-system Real-time Network (ACORN) no/low-code framework for high fidelity simulation. Redwire combines real hardware components with virtual simulated components and environments in a process called hardware-in-the-loop simulation.

Making Sense of Complex Scenarios and Threats

“With the ever-increasing complexity of defense missions and the associated threats, it’s not feasible to test all possible solutions, and it is inadequate to only look at something in one or two dimensions,” explains Massa. “We need methods for making sense of the chaos and accurately simulating these complex scenarios. The effective application of modeling and simulation allows you to do that – to look at these problems from different angles and gain insights that you otherwise would not be able to get any other way.”

For Massa, a principal spacecraft systems engineer who came to Redwire a year ago with over 30 years of experience in space systems development, Redwire’s unique approach to digital engineering represents the foundation of something new – of what’s possible when you combine all your digital engineering tools in a single environment and integrate this virtual world with the physical implementation involving space-proven flight hardware.

“We’re focusing on data and not documents – rigorously capturing data in structured formats. When you do that, it enables all sorts of things – it allows you to query the data, analyze it better and integrate the data from different domains. You can’t really do that using a paper-based process,” says the Stanford and MIT-educated aerospace engineer.

For Al Tadros, CTO of Redwire, DEMSI and Shadow Lab reinforce that Redwire not only understands the customer’s problems but also has viable solutions proven out in the digital domain.

“Customers want high confidence that they’re going to get what they’ve asked for,” he says, explaining Redwire delivers an integrated set of designs, analysis and modeling simulations to prove its readiness for program execution.

“This gives them confidence – it burns down the risk.  Customers know we understand what they’re asking for and we have a plan that’s actually based on a digital form that we can execute.”

Combining Domain Engineering Tools with High-fidelity Simulations

DEMSI brought to life in Shadow Lab is proving instrumental as Redwire develops innovative spacecraft, optical and RF payloads, solar arrays, and various other space and airborne infrastructure components and systems. Redwire digital engineering experts are also harnessing these capabilities to model potential solutions for the Golden Dome for America.

“Digital engineering is vital across both air and space domains,” Tadros says.

He envisions AI also being represented in Redwire’s digital engineering environment, whether it’s autonomous operations, machine vision or other technologies, calling it more than traditional solution sets and technologies in mission domains. The benefits are clear: improved efficiency leading to faster, proven solutions addressing complex customer requirements.  Redwire’s approach enables automation and the reuse of models and tools and information.

“Ultimately, it should allow us to produce higher quality products more quickly and more effectively for our customers,” Massa says.

Simulating Realistic Scenarios

Redwire has hosted several defense agencies at Shadow Lab, but the company foresees its value both internally and with external clients. It features high-performance computing, so teams can run complex simulations and models efficiently.

Redwire is applying digital engineering across all of its business units and product lines, from the mission to the component level. For example, DEMSI capabilities enable solar array engineers to change orbital parameters for a spacecraft simulation and see how that affects the solar array power generation and radiation exposure. The team also could change the solar array material properties to see how that would affect performance and requirements satisfaction.

Redwire’s DEMSI also can help government missions focused on tracking and communications, and the need to cover whole or large portions of Earth. Massa explains, “You may have a lot of options for how spacecraft operate in different orbital planes. How many sensors or what type of sensor you might have for each spacecraft, and what their performance parameters are, so we can vary all those things and then compare those different options against a set of requirements and try to optimize a solution.”

Tadros adds that DEMSI and Shadow Lab enable Redwire to provide deeper insights to customers regarding both the problem and solution spaces for their missions.

Redwire is currently talking with potential partners about how their digital engineering tools and techniques could further enhance Shadow Lab’s foundation and allow Redwire to do more advanced modeling and testing in the future.

Tadros believes his firm stands out because of its practical expertise with engineering hardware that has flown in space.

“Our engineering isn’t just a digital form; we have a lot of real-time flight experience and feedback that we can bring into it,” he says.

While most of the digital engineering tools used in DEMSI are common across space companies, they are typically distributed on people’s laptops, with only outputs shared with the overall team in a document or table. By integrating all these tools into an immersive lab environment, Redwire can more quickly see the ripple effects of changes in parameters or requirements. It’s also more readily understood by non-technical audiences, from C-suite leaders to Congressional leaders or staffers, Tadros says.

“It helps our team get intuition into the design, making it almost a digital twin type of experience,” Tadros says.

Tadros is most excited by the “confidence, trust, and unified understanding” that Redwire’s DEMSI and Shadow Lab will deliver, “solving the problems that we’ve set out to solve.”