This is more related to Systems Engineering (not software Engineering) but is an interesting effort to drive down system costs (development and operation) through the development of a new, ground breaking architecture to explore the moon, and from there the solar system:
https://www.space.com/37464-moon-express-solar-system-exploration.html
Quoting:
"Therefore, the potential exists to cut space-exploration costs significantly — for example, by an order of magnitude or so on MX-9 missions, Richards said.
"That's when you get a radical price reduction — a collapse, really, of the costs down to hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram [of payload to the lunar surface] from the millions that it is today for smaller systems," he told Space.com. "I really hope that we're able to do for lunar access what cubesats did for access to low Earth orbit.""
