Space Standards MCP server

space-standards-mcp

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.manojknaikade/space-standards-mcp -->

An MCP server (and a thin optional agent) that answers questions about ECSS and NASA space standards with exact, requirement-level citations: every result names the document, issue and requirement ID, or the answer is "not covered". You bring the standards; nothing from them is stored in this repository. It is aimed at launcher and payload-fairing structures first (factors of safety, fracture control, loads, shock, vibroacoustics) and is built to grow to the whole ECSS and NASA set.

Independent project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Space Agency (ESA), the ECSS Secretariat

or NASA. The ECSS, ESA and NASA names and the names of their standards belong to their owners and are used here

only to identify the documents the software works with.

60-second demo (invented fixtures)

The repository ships three invented demo standards and a demo handbook in tests/fixtures/ (made-up text and numbers, so you can try everything without any real document).

git clone https://github.com/manojknaikade/space-standards-mcp.git && cd space-standards-mcp
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate      # Python 3.11+
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q                                              # fixture tests; real-document tests skip without documents/

# retrieval eval on the demo standards: expected recall@5 1.00 over 4 questions
python eval/run_retrieval_eval.py --docs tests/fixtures --questions eval/demo_questions.yaml

# the MCP server over the demo standards (stdio; an MCP client talks to it)
SPACESTD_DOCS=tests/fixtures python -m spacestd.server

Connect a client (below) to that server and ask, for example, "which factor of safety applies to a metallic fairing in DEMO-E-ST-98C?". The answer comes back with a citation such as DEMO-E-ST-98C Rev.2, 4.1.2a.

Use your own documents

No standards text is distributed here. Download the documents yourself and put them in documents/ (gitignored) or any folder you point SPACESTD_DOCS at:

fetches the public ones politely (robots.txt, one request every 2 s); --dry-run only lists them.

• ECSS: (free registration); Word or PDF.
• NASA: the NASA Technical Standards System, . python scripts/downloadnasastandards.py documents/nasa

Then:

python -m spacestd.catalogue documents      # what was found, and what is loaded
python -m spacestd.health documents         # parse every document, set its tier, write eval/CORPUS_HEALTH.md

documents/corpus.yaml selects what is loaded (doc-ID patterns with *, see ADR-0006); without it only files directly in documents/ load:

load:
  - ECSS-E-ST-32*
  - NASA-STD-5*

File naming, sidecar metadata and formats (PDF preferred; Word files need LibreOffice) are described in documents/README.md. Parsed documents are cached in documents/.spacestd-cache/. The standards remain subject to their publishers' terms of use.

Install without a clone

The package is on PyPI:

uvx space-standards-mcp
pipx install space-standards-mcp

The latest development version installs from git: pipx install git+https://github.com/manojknaikade/space-standards-mcp.

The space-standards-mcp command starts the server (stdio) and reads SPACESTD_DOCS.

Connect an MCP client

Use an absolute path to the Python that has the package installed, and to your documents folder.

With uvx, a client can start the server without a local install, e.g. in Claude Desktop: {"command": "uvx", "args": ["space-standards-mcp"], "env": {"SPACESTD_DOCS": "/abs/path/to/documents"}}.

Claude Code

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.