GSAW, the Ground System Architectures Workshop, is an international forum for spacecraft ground system users, developers, and researchers to share their experiences through presentations, working groups, and panel discussions. GSAW is sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation in cooperation with the Space and Missile Systems Center, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other organizations.
Beginnings
In the mid-1990s, a small group of ground system architects and researchers at Aerospace envisioned a series of annual workshops to help ground system planners transition to common consensus-based open system architectures. To realize this vision, Aerospace began working with the University of Southern California's Center for Software Engineering (USC-CSE), which was pursuing a project on complex software design cosponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
The workshop became a reality in February, 1997, when Aerospace and the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) cosponsored the first Ground System Architectures Workshop (GSAW) held at the Aerospace campus in El Segundo, California, USA. More than 200 participants met for three days of plenary presentations, panel discussions, and a keynote address by the SMC commander. That first GSAW focused on the role of software architectures in spacecraft ground system standardization, implementation (using commercial products, middleware, and frameworks), and interoperability.