SATURN 2020

Leveraging a history of airspace management innovation, NASA recognized the need to manage disparate drone operations at a scales never before seen. Thus, we invented the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) System. I will describe the evolution of UTM from its white paper phase around 2014 through flight tests this summer with dozens of industry partners in Reno and Corpus Christi. We had to juggle deadlines, budgets, public visibility, and the expectations of multiple stakeholders. All the while trying to build a software-heavy system that a) met stakeholder goals and b) was feasible for operational deployment (two surprisingly different things). Our plan was to roll out UTM based on the operational environments the system needed to manage, starting with low-risk operations and progressing to dense, urban drone traffic. What we ended up with, namely a federated architecture of multiple service suppliers collaboratively managing the airspace, was definitely not what we started with. It also was not something that any of us could have imagined from the outset. Only through building out an MVP, iterating with stakeholders, and testing the system in the field could we have reached our end product. This presentation is the story of that journey from an architectural perspective.