Reducing the design time and increasing performance of spacecraft hardware is clearly highly desirable for NASA missions. We are proposing to develop software algorithms that automatically design and optimize antennas to achieve both of these goals. With our recent success in using evolutionary algorithms to design the antenna for the Space Technology 5 mission we achieved several advantages over the conventional design approach: reduced design time, rapid re-design time in response to a change in mission requirements, increased performance and increased reliability. Based on this success we expect that with further algorithm development we can routinely achieve both design time savings and higher performance antennas as compared to conventional design techniques. In addition, generality of the evolutionary algorithms approach strongly suggests that this approach can be used for the computer-automated design of scientific instruments such as optics systems, MEMS devices and others.