Space Systems Engineering
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate systems engineering course (16.89 / ESD.352), built around a single semester-long design project: a lunar or orbital telescope facility. Students spend the first half of the term on architectural analysis, weighing astrophysical goals, engineering constraints, budget, and policy factors for both ground-based lunar surface telescopes and orbital alternatives, culminating in a Preliminary Design Review. In the second half, teams take one or two of the strongest architectures and develop them into a detailed concept presented at a Critical Design Review, covering the science program, telescope design, stakeholder relationships, budget and timeline estimates, and the role of human explorers in deployment and servicing. Materials include the project assignments and design review structure used in the actual MIT class. The course gives a concrete look at how systems engineers balance scientific ambition against cost, human factors, and institutional politics in a real space mission design exercise.