A Case Study in Implementing SMC/NSS Mission Risk Class Requirements

This paper presents a case study of an effective approach to implementing and documenting compliance with Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) requirements for A-D Mission Risk Classes as applied to National Security Space (NSS) payloads. This approach created tools for organizing and documenting the individual requirements from the guiding SMC document, Aerospace Corporation TOR-2011(8591)-21 [1], and used those tools to track planning for, implementation of, and documenting compliance with each requirement area. This paper describes how this approach was developed and used for medium sized spaceflight hardware design, development, and production efforts. A MS Excel workbook was created in the course of scoping and understanding the requirements. This workbook then grew organically as additional information on plans and implementation were incorporated. Additional COTS tools including JIRA and MS Word were integrated into the primary Excel tool. These tools allowed for understanding of the requirements, negotiation and agreement on tailoring of requirements, planning the implementation approach, monitoring and directing the implementation, and finally auditing compliance. Use of this approach allowed these Draper programs to meet all of the requirements for SMC Class B missions and was very highly complemented by all organizations involved. It is our contention that this approach could be applied by small and medium sized organizations who may be called on to meet either SMC or NASA A-D Mission Risk Class Requirements and may not have existing systems in place to manage the process.