Space is an unforgiving environment. That makes putting technology on a spacecraft that much more complicated — and that much more expensive.

From huge temperature swings and massive amounts of radiation to sun flares, public and private sector organizations have to determine the best approaches to meeting mission needs without wasting time and money.

And that’s where digital twins come in, said Hans Weggeman, the field application engineer at Wind RiverX.

“You need to be able to learn how the system will degrade over time. It’s not a matter of if it will, but when,” Weggeman said during Federal News Network’s Space & Satellite Exchange 2026. “You need to be creative and have that idea of moving around memory. Things can get corrupted over time. We joke that the Mars Curiosity Rover just became a teenager, and Perseverance just made a whole marathon on Mars. Simulating software updates before you actually send them out and patch them — adding capabilities — is really important because we can’t exactly send somebody out to fix it onsite.”

Using AI to speed data exchange

Many times, technology systems need to be radiation hardened to protect them against the harsh environment of space. At the same time, Weggeman said the systems have to be powerful enough to send data back to earth.

“What we’re starting to see is a fundamental shift with edge artificial intelligence and physical AI, which is doing more things at the edge, ingesting all this data down through data links,” he said. “Most recently, with the Artemis missions, you saw NASA beaming down 4K video the entire time, which we’ve never done before. So with more data, we can make better decisions in real time, or as close to real time as possible. But we still have to abide by laws of physics.”

Dealing with low-bandwidth environments

Digital twins also help organizations mitigate risks, while also letting scientists and engineers embrace new and emerging technologies, said Jim Keenan, vice president of sales at Wind RiverX.

“You can’t just say, ‘Hey, hit the I believe button,’ for a warfighter. It gives a level of confidence at a lower price point for our customers,” Kennan said. “I think that going to market with an ecosystem — using concepts like digital twins, pilots, using things that the government’s starting to use more of to insert technology, like other transaction agreements and other procurement types to buy from, such as cooperative research and development agreements — is going to be key. These speed up the process and give you the acquisition process and the ability to get technology fielded much more rapidly.”

By simulating an environment, including on Earth, where unforgiving environments like sea or desert are well-known but no less difficult to operate in and around, users can see how technology will react, better understand its limits and create the necessary trust that it will operate at scale when necessary, he said.

“When you look at the Indo-Pacific Command area of operations, it’s characterized by 51% water, lots of islands and, unlike past campaigns where we had the ability to utilize data centers and cloud computing to push things out to the edge and be able to operate, you are going to face a disconnected, intermittent and low-bandwidth environments,” Kennan pointed out.

The result? Agencies will need technology and software that can support edge capabilities at the far edge and that requires the right set of capabilities.

“It’s not going to be one company that’s going to be doing it either,” Keenan said. “You’ve got to have companies that can partner and bring lots of people onboard to bring the capabilities — software providers that can also then work with the artificial intelligence providers that can bring out that capability to operate in the types of environments that our warfighters are going to have to operate in.”

Driving technical collaboration

The demand for an ecosystem of capabilities from an assortment of providers makes the use of application programming interfaces that much more important, Weggeman pointed out.

Vendors must develop hardware and software using open standards and modular architectures as a way to break down the barriers that arise in different environments, he said.

“Bespoke software or hardware is expensive, so you want to be able to have open standards, so that you have interoperability,” Weggeman said. “Today, no one company is offering the complete solution. We provide a tiny piece, and we help integrate and be that digital backbone for so many different companies, providing data when it really matters.”

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