nasa/cFS

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1472 stars · 383 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

NASA's Core Flight System (cFS) is a generic flight software architecture framework written in C, used on spacecraft ranging from flagship and human-rated missions to cubesats and Raspberry Pi. This repository is a bundle of submodules (cFE, OSAL, PSP, and example apps) that builds and executes a reference system for command ingest and telemetry output.

Use cases

• build flight software for a cubesat
• run cFS on a Raspberry Pi for embedded experiments
• send commands and receive telemetry from a cFS bundle
• develop and test spacecraft applications with the cFE framework
• simulate flight software in QEMU during CI
• start a mission flight software baseline from an open-source framework

When to choose

• you need a proven, reusable flight software architecture for a spacecraft mission
• you want an open-source starting point for cFE/OSAL/PSP-based development
• you're prototyping embedded flight software on commodity hardware like Raspberry Pi

When to avoid

• you need a fully verified operational flight distribution out of the box
• your project requires the government-only Distro C features under a Software User Agreement
• you need extensive mission-specific verification and validation done for you

Facets

framework · maturity stable

middleware embedded sdk testing embedded-systems developer-tools simulation embedded cross-platform flight-software spacecraft nasa cfe osal cubesat real-time aerospace linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="nasa/cFS")