One tool - one team: the marriage of test and operations in a low-budget spacecraft development

Abstract

The Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate (AFRL/VS) and the Department of Defense Space Test Program (STP) are two organizations that have partnered on more than 85 missions since 1968 to develop, launch, and operate Research and Development, Test and Evaluation space missions. As valuable as these missions have been to the follow-on generation of Operational systems, they are consistently under-funded and forced to execute on excessively ambitious development schedules. Due to these constraints, space mission development teams that serve the RDT&E community are faced with a number of unique technical and programmatic challenges. AFRL and STP have taken various approaches throughout the mission lifecycle to accelerate their development schedules, without sacrificing cost or system reliability. In the areas of test and operations, they currently employ one of two strategies. Historically, they have sought to avoid the added cost and complexity associated with development schedules and segregated the spacecraft development and test effort from the ground system development and test effort. However, because these efforts have far more in common than they have differences, they have more recently attempted to pursue parallel I&T and Operations development and readiness efforts. This paper seeks to compare and contrast the decoupled test and operations approach, used by such missions as C/NOFS and Coriolis, with the coupled test and operations approach, adopted by the XSS-11 and TacSat-2 missions.