For being the world’s largest low voltage direct current (LVDC) microgrid (MG) in space, the power generation and distribution systems aboard the International Space Station (ISS) employ a hierarchical assortment of electric power sources, energy storage, control devices, power electronics, and loads operating cooperatively at multifarious system dispositions and multi-stage configurations. At the early phase of design, for such time-critical systems, the trade-off between reliability and convergence rate of device modeling, varying accuracy requirements of control flows, and especially the implementation for real-time performance have brought new challenges and problems for testing and validation of the MG. One of the solutions presented by this paper is to use the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) emulation, where the MG is emulated using the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware platform. In parallel with the emulation effort, comprehensive modeling solutions for both large-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar array wings (SAWs) and nonlinear behavior model (NBM) of insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) have been utilized based on machine learning (ML) concepts of artificial neural network (ANN) and recurrent neural network (RNN). Both system-level (validated by Matlab/Simulink) and device-level (validated by SaberRD) transient simulations are carried out, and the results exhibit high accuracy and fidelity of the models and significant improvements in execution speed and hardware resource consumption.