Abstract: Aerospace equipment includes a wide range of products, including aircraft and spacecraft components, as well as the machinery, instruments, and systems used in both aeronautics and astronautics. This equipment plays a critical role in exploration and research, where experimentation and validation are essential to ensuring its performance. Traditionally, experimentation and validation have relied heavily on physical methods. However, as aerospace systems become more complex and the demand for multi-domain collaborative operations increases, traditional physical methods have proven to be time-consuming, costly, and limited in scope. To address these challenges, digital technologies have attracted growing attention for their potential to transform the traditional experimentation and validation paradigm from physical to digital methods. In this context, building upon the authors’ previously proposed five-dimensional digital twin model and the associated theories and standards for digital experimentation and validation, this work first discusses the primary requirements for the experimentation and validation of aerospace equipment, where digital experiment and validation methods are identified as the future trend. Second, a five-level maturity model for the digital experimentation and validation of aerospace equipment is proposed. Third, a generic workflow for the implementation of digital experimentation and validation is presented; a series of enabling technologies that support this transformation are introduced; and a reference architecture for fusing digital and physical experimentation and validation is also proposed. Lastly, the current challenges and future prospects in this field are outlined from the perspectives of overall layout, cutting-edge technologies, industrial ecology, and standardization. It is expected that this work can serve as a valuable reference for enhancing aerospace experiment and validation capabilities, enabling a more accurate, efficient, comprehensive, cost-effective, and lower-risk experiment and validation process for aerospace equipment; and support the future development of aerospace equipment toward digitalization, networking, intelligence, autonomy, and systematization.

Key words: Digital experiment and validation, digital-physical fusion, aerospace equipment, reference architecture, digital engineering