A New Approach to Flight Equipment: Clementine & MSTI Work at JPL

The Ballistic Missile Defense Office/Air Force's Clementine and Miniature Seeker Technology Insertion (MSTI) programs have set new standards for spacecraft cost/performance. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, work on these programs has driven changes in traditional approaches to spacecraft design, fabrication, test and integration. High-visibility, billion-dollar spacecraft are typically built to a "Class A" standard of quality and reliability. Organizations, including JPL, which receive multiple development contracts for Class A missions have been very successful in creating approaches which do a good job of delivering to these high standards. They have been less successful, however, in modifying these standards for programs of less-stringent requirements. Often, "Class C" and "Class D" programs are accomplished entirely outside the core of the "Class A" organization, resulting in either unnecessary duplication or lack of access to top-notch people and facilities or both. In this paper we describe how these problems were addressed through the successful "custom tailoring" of JPL's world-class capabilities to the Class D requirements of the Clementine RRELAX experiment and the MSTI-3 data compression subsystem. Hallmarks of this new approach were a very successful use of concurrent engineering practice, a high-level of teamwork, the assembly of a team from across a wider-than-normal cross section of JPL, the use of a very flat management structure and the willingness of upper-management to support new ideas and new methods. The MSTI-3 and Clementine RRELAX projects were designed, assembled and tested by the same staff and facilities which are now developing the $1.6B Cassini spacecraft. The paper also identifies the needed areas of flexibility essential for moving back and forth from Class A to Class C & D projects and how this has improved JPL's ability to move from capability-driven to cost-driven spacecraft projects.