For a long time, design and construction of satellites has been associated to high costs. The world-wide economic
environment has forced us to rethink the criteria by which these spacecrafts have been developed, giving priority
to efficiency but combined with a global cost reduction. We present the preliminary design of an earth-
observation satellite, whose mission consists essentially in developing a map of the underground of an area where
we know that archaeological rests exist. Furthermore, if to the previous mission, we add that the selected area is
located in a country with an emerging economy such as China or Mexico, the project is easily justified by their
goverments if its cost does not result high.
The size of this article constrains scope of the study to one of its subsystems, so we had chosen the structural
subsystem without disabling other possibilities. This phase ends when the previously detailed satellite concept is
validated. We used the milestones model to manage the configuration. After modeling with a monocoque
structure, we conclude that it can be improved with a semi-monocoque structure, which combines the advantages
of weight reduction, and the most important thing, achieves it with the basis objective of reduced costs.
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