Rethinking space systems design: backward compatibility to minimize future space occupation

The efforts for space sustainability aim to minimize the occupation of space by considering outer Earth space as a limited resource. Current initiatives for space sustainability primarily address mitigating the existing space debris. This paper suggests that sustainability can be integrated into the early design stages of future space systems. The paper explores the idea of backward compatibility within the context of sustainable space communication systems with the aim to minimize the future occupation of space and presents an initial analysis of this strategy. Specifically, we address the idea of backward compatibility with earlier space components by analyzing a database of current space systems and the idea of backward compatibility with ground stations by optimizing the design of a satellite constellation for the available set of ground stations.