In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid development of small aerospace flight vehicles which can use network topology to fully realize the complex performance of traditional large spacecraft. Furthermore, small aerospace flight vehicles can greatly reduce the costs and risks borne by a large flight vehicle, and significantly increase the flexibility and robustness of the system. Distributed space systems, e.g., constellation, cluster, swarms, fractionated satellite, and federated satellite, including many flight vehicles distributed in different orbits cooperating with each other to perform a complex flight mission.

However, the main challenge of distributed space systems lies in the complex dynamic coupling between spacecraft and the environment and inter-spacecraft switching topology, and multiple complex disturbances, e.g., external disturbances, model parameter uncertainties, controller’s perturbations, input delay, measurement errors, input constraints or saturation, actuator fault signals, and other nonlinear perturbations widely act on spacecraft systems. The present generation of spacecraft should be capable of high-precision maneuvers and increased robustness to multiple complex disturbances.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collate original research and review articles that investigate the developments of dynamics and control of distributed space systems.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Topology evolution of satellite clusters
• Topology modeling and optimization
• Topology reconstruction and control
• Orbit navigation, guidance, and control
• Attitude dynamics and cooperative control
• Non-fragile altitude/orbit control
• Robust altitude/orbit control
• Fault-tolerant altitude/orbit control
• In-space assembly and construction
• Self-organizing control for satellite swarms
• Distributed path planning for space systems
• Swarm intelligence approaches
• Novel theory for satellite constellations