The DisCo project funded by the European Space Agency addresses future space missions with complex payload data handling applications.

The key features are hard real-time constraints for applications running in embedded environment of a medium to large size space mission, partitioning between applications having different levels or criticality, and distributed computing.

This paper presents an overview of the DisCo Space-Oriented Middleware (SOM) which provides support for DisCo applications running in distributed environment and having stringent requirements for predictability, fault detection and handling.

The paper identifies key motivations for building DisCo SOM, provides a brief overview of the SOM architecture, compares it with other solutions and makes suggestions for future work.