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This paper presents the approach, the status and the future of two companion open standards for electronic exchange and archival of space engineering data: 1) STEP-NRF - Network-model Results Format - a discipline-independent protocol for the definitions of analysis, test or operation cases/models and the bulk results produced by running such cases/models. A generic network-model formulation is used to represent the different elements of an analysis model, a test article or an operational product and where applicable their environment. The results are stored as valued properties for particular network-model components for a particular state during a run. Properties can be of scalar, vector or tensor type. Special care is taken to ensure efficient storage of sparse data structures. 2) STEP-TAS - Thermal Analysis for Space - a protocol for the definitions of space missions and models used in thermal analysis.

This paper reports on the first phase of the development of the STEP-based Thermal Analysis for Space Application Protocol (STEP-TAS AP), an initiative by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with the French Space Agency (CNES). The activity responds to the industrial need to have a standard, quality means for the electronic exchange of thermal models between the various companies and organisations involved in space projects and also to improve the possibility to exchange data with tools of other engineering disciplines (notably CAD tools). The development is based on the use of STEP, which is the casual name for the ISO 10303 Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data. The following topics are highlighted: The production of a common description of the information exchange requirements in the space thermal analysis domain, based on work previously initiated by ESA and CNES.