Satellite Mission Compiler brings policy-as-code guardrails to cloud-native space platforms

A team of researchers (Hsiu-Chi Tsai and Chia-Tung Chung) open-sourced Satellite Mission Compiler, a four-stage pipeline that bridges the gap between human-authored satellite mission plans and the container-workflow artifacts consumed by emerging cloud-native satellite runtimes. These runtimes—including ORCHIDE, Axiom Space's AxDCU-1, and Kepler's Jetson nodes—currently lack a publicly available ground-side toolchain. The compiler accepts a mission plan, validates it against a Pydantic schema derived from public ORCHIDE materials, evaluates it against an OPA/Rego policy package of 10 deny rules with documented provenance, compiles it into a typed WorkflowIntent intermediate representation, and renders it as Argo Workflow DAGs and Kueue Job manifests with Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA). Pre-uplink loss events are classified into four severity tiers tied to specific schema and policy checks, with the layered-validation design anchored in NASA-STD-8739.8B's safety-driven defense-in-depth rather than NIST's security-focused approach.

The implementation was validated through golden translation evaluations, argo lint compliance, an in-process baseline that reproduces OPA's decisions, and live single-node cluster submissions. Notably, it demonstrated a DRA-backed GPU admission cascade on Kueue v0.17.3 (re-validated on v0.18.3) and, on v0.18.3, a unified GPU+CPU device-class quota with a scheduler-level accelerator fallback. Six Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools expose the pipeline to AI agents, enabling automated mission planning integration. The compiler is released under the EUPL-1.2 license (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21228150) and was accepted at IEEE SMC-IT/SCC 2026. The paper (13 pages) adds a unified GPU+CPU DRA quota and scheduler-level accelerator fallback re-validated on Kueue v0.18.3.