Memory Safe to Mission Safe Advancing Rust Based cFS for Critical Flight Applications

This project continues the success of the FY25 IRAD “Re-Imagining cFS in Rust – A Memory Safe Language.” The Agency’s emphasis on cybersecurity is pushing us towards using secure and memory-safe programming languages for our most critical functions, such as safety and mission critical class A flight software (FSW). Rust prevents most classes of memory errors, the primary source of software vulnerabilities and undefined behavior on orbit. It also prevents concurrency errors which occur when various parts of the software attempt to access and modify data simultaneously, an increasingly dangerous situation with multi-core systems such as HPSC entering the arena. Rust also provides protection against subtle issues such as converting between data types and losing precision or incorrect unit assumptions, the types of error that can doom a mission. The prior year IRAD has already provided infrastructure to create FSW apps in Rust with core Flight System (cFS) and converted several key services to Rust. Today, a Rust app can run in the cFS ecosystem, send telemetry, handle commands, run unit tests, and more. This project seeks to both expand the suite of core services provided in Rust and raise the maturity of it through test coverage and seeking flight opportunities. Specifically, it converts the Time service to Rust, ensuring proper synchronization of clocks on the spacecraft, and begins to convert the most critical reusable applications, such as the memory manager. It emphasizes unit tests, ensuring proper coverage to comply with the strictest of NPR 7150 standards. Finally, it attempts to integrate the Rust architecture onto a flight opportunity, raising the TRL of the codebase to garner more adoption to allow the community to utilize Rust. It does all this while keeping to the principle of maintaining compatibility with the C language, continuing to support projects that choose to use C and the existing suite of heritage apps.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.