The Space Power Consortium was conceived in the later half of 2019 by a diverse group of NASA, USAF, and Industry representatives to address the need for advanced power systems in the next generation of crewed and robotic space systems.

The group envisioned distributed, intelligent system power systems and components that could be tightly integrated with the next generation of high performance, low power, spacecraft avionics, instruments and busses. They also recognized the need to accommodate centralized implementations as well as varying degrees of distribution in small sats, large orbiters, in situ planetary robotic science and exploration vehicles (e.g., rovers), and human exploration platforms such as the International Space Station, Gateway and Artemis.

An organizing committee was formed in January of 2020 and In March of 2020, at the Government Microcircuits and Applications Technology (GOMACTech) Conference, a kickoff meeting was held. Representatives from US and EU govt and industry and academia were present and, at the end of the day, it was decided by popular vote, to create a new standards body focused on next generation, advanced spacecraft power systems and components.

A core group formed in April 2020 to establish a modus operandi for the organization, charter the first critical committees and working groups, develop a working methodology and initial analysis tools.

The Architecture Standing Committee was stood up in April 2020. It was decided to initially organize around a hierarchical taxonomy of use cases that would be used to define applications and derive requirements for spacecraft power systems. The Architecture committed then determined that a SysML modeling approach would be used to provide a reference architecture and is currently engaged in developing that model and defining use cases.

The Power Management Working Group was stood up in July 2020 to start the process of defining/deriving power management bus use cases and requirements. In similar fashion to the reference architecture, a SysML model of the power management subsystem is currently under development.

A set of use case documentation and analysis tools was developed that utilizes the hierarchical taxonomy and common use case formats to derive requirements. These are currently hosted on a Google Drive along with a recorded tutorial on their use and are available to SPC members.