DrawCraft: a spacecraft design tool for integrated concurrent engineering

DrawCraft is a design productivity tool that quickly enables engineers to render preliminary spacecraft within the Computer Aided Drafting suite SolidWorks. User-friendly and easy to learn, DrawCraft assists the entire design process by using templates of the most commonly used spacecraft components, requiring minimal information from the user. All of the information necessary to fully define a spacecraft of some number (n) parts is kept in a datamatrix of n rows by 21 columns. The n by 21 datamatrix can be exported to a tab-delimited text file called the Shared Mechanical Control Sheet or the Products Attributes Database. DrawCraft can also import data from the PAD or an SMCS and then render the corresponding spacecraft. The importance of the SMCS is that many elements of the datamatrix are either common engineering parameters or are simply related to such parameters. Hence, DrawCraft can import design parameters from other tools such as trades models or design databases.