The NASA Exploration Design Team: blueprint for a new design paradigm

Abstract

To meet the nation's goal of a new direction in human and robotic space exploration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) must rapidly develop concepts, architectures, and requirements for the next generation of space exploration systems. This requires a rapid architectural design capability, quick access to the vast expertise distributed throughout NASA centers and external partners, and impartial analysis of options. To accomplish these goals, the NASA Exploration Design Team (NEDT) has been established to provide the infrastructure, tools and processes to evaluate exploration program, mission and technology trade studies in a collaborative, distributed, real-time environment. Experience with JPL's Team X studies of robotic space missions (there have been over 650 designs to date) demonstrates that significant efficiencies can be captured in performing these complex studies in a collaborative environment with common tools and processes. Team X has reduced per-study costs by a factor of 5 and per-study duration by a factor of 10 compared to conventional design processes. The Team X concept has spread to other NASA centers, industry, academia, and international partners. The goal for NEDT at project completion is to achieve a study turn-around time of as low as 2 weeks. In this paper, we present an extension of the JPL Team X process to the NASA-wide collaborative design team. We describe the architecture and approach for such a process and elaborate on the implementation challenges of this process. We further discuss current ideas on how to address these challenges