Draper CAMS (Crew Autonomy)

ABOUT DRAPER CAMS (CREW AUTONOMY)

“Draper CAMS (Crew Autonomy)” is a way of describing the onboard software that Charles Stark Draper Laboratory writes so that a crewed spacecraft can fly itself, look after its own systems, and handle problems with little or no real-time help from Earth.

Quick facts

• Developer: Draper (formerly the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory), Cambridge, Massachusetts, named for Charles Stark “Doc” Draper, the “father of inertial navigation.”
• Heritage: Draper designed the Apollo Guidance Computer and wrote essentially all of Apollo’s guidance, navigation and control flight software in the 1960s.
• Job: crew-autonomy avionics — the electronic and software systems that let a spacecraft navigate, steer, and self-manage.
• Modern systems: Orion spacecraft GN&C flight software; the Gateway lunar station Vehicle System Manager (VSM); and Draper’s ADEPT autonomy framework and Space Autonomy Mission Manager (SAMM).

A note on the name: “CAMS” is not a confirmed, officially published Draper product acronym. The real, documented Draper crew-autonomy software is described below.

What it is

Crew autonomy is the layer of software that lets a crewed spacecraft make decisions on its own. This matters because of light-time delay — the minutes (or longer) it takes radio signals to travel between Earth and a distant ship — and because of communication blackouts when the spacecraft is out of contact. The farther from Earth a mission goes, the less a crew can wait for Mission Control to answer.

How it works

At its heart the software does three classic GN&C (Guidance, Navigation and Control) jobs. Think of driving a car at night: navigation answers “where am I, and which way am I pointed?”; guidance answers “what path gets me to my destination?” — here a rocket burn, a docking, or a landing; and control is the actual steering, commanding thrusters and other actuators to fly that path.

On top of those sits a higher-level “vehicle manager.” On the Gateway lunar station this is the Vehicle System Manager (VSM), the topmost software in a layered design that plans the mission timeline, allocates power and other resources, detects and isolates faults, and decides what to do. The VSM can run in different modes — from fully autonomous operation with no crew and minimal ground watching, down to “advisory” mode that simply recommends actions to astronauts who are aboard. Draper’s mission managers, including SAMM, are built on its ADEPT framework (All-Domain Execution and Planning Technology), which breaks big goals into smaller tasks and follows a “sense, reason, act” loop.

The hard part is not making software autonomous — it is making it trustworthy. To prove Gateway’s autonomy is safe, engineers use formal methods, a kind of mathematical double-checking. They write assume-guarantee contracts — written promises about what each part will do as long as its inputs behave — using specialized checking tools (languages called PlusCal and TLA+). A separate monitor known as R2U2 then watches the software during flight to confirm it stays inside its safe limits.

Why it matters

Crew autonomy is the enabling avionics for sustained operations far from Earth. Apollo proved Draper’s onboard-computing approach when astronauts were only minutes of light-time away. For the Moon, with seconds of delay and frequent comm gaps, and eventually Mars, with many minutes of delay, spacecraft must increasingly fly, self-monitor, and self-heal without waiting for the ground. Autonomy also lets a station like Gateway run safely through long uncrewed stretches, and lets a capsule like Orion carry out precise burns, rendezvous, docking, and entry — either on its own or with the crew in the loop. The result is less ground-staffing burden, better crew safety during outages, and a prerequisite for crewed Mars missions where Earth cannot intervene in real time.

Notable examples

• Orion spacecraft (Artemis I, 2022; Artemis II): Draper developed the GN&C flight software, plus rendezvous, proximity-operations and docking software, and the Powered Explicit Guidance algorithm used during the exo-atmospheric phase of SLS ascent.
• Lunar Gateway: the Vehicle System Manager targets up to about 21 days of normal operation without ground support, including handling faults, with dormant uncrewed periods of up to roughly 9 months.
• Apollo program: the historical anchor — the Apollo Guidance Computer and its flight software, origin of all later crew-autonomy work.
• Autonomous rendezvous and docking: Draper software applied to ISS-docking vehicles such as Cygnus and Dream Chaser, and to Orion testing.
• XSS-11 and Orbital Express: earlier ADEPT-based spacecraft that established the framework now used for crewed vehicles.

OPERATING PRINCIPLE

VEHICLES USING THIS SYSTEM

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DETAILED SPECS