Advanced Cost Model for Space Concepts Development

The Advatech Pacific, Inc. Team (API Team) will analyze historical programmatic data for selected space-system development programs that are representative of current programs of interest. These programs will be analyzed with respect to specific technologies that have gone through a technology maturity cycle. This analysis will define the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) at each point in the development cycle. This information will then be mapped to a set of normalized Technology Cost, Risk & Maturity curves that will illustrate the relationship between budgeted cost (i.e., funding available to the project managers) and the level of risk and/or probability of success for each given technology at each TRL for space programs. Differences in how the various historical space programs have been managed will lead to estimating error distributions for the technologies under study. Statistically summing all system risks, including those associated with technology development, will then result in a total cost/risk distribution for each space program whose cost is to be estimated. The cost model, based on this analysis, can then be used to predict the required investment needed to execute a space program that is pushing the technical state of the art. The total cost/risk distribution allows the decision maker to associate a degree of confidence in program executability with any proposed program budget. Simultaneously, the API Team will develop the plan for implementing this programmatic Life Cycle Cost/risk (LCC/risk) model strategy into a stochastic analysis code that will automate the computations required to translate the engineering analysis into a cost estimate. Further, this code would make use of the logic and capabilities of existing commercial and Government cost models where they are found appropriate. Most importantly, the plan will address how the stochastic analysis code (and the appropriate commercial cost models) will become an element of the technical design and analysis framework, called the Integrated Space Engineering Tool (ISET), currently being developed and used by AFRL/VSE at Kirtland AFB, NM. This will give ISET the capability to be used to direct technology investment during a program's conceptual phase.