Informing Large Space Science Missions from SmallSat/Class-D Mission Lessons Learned

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has flown successful large strategic flagship missions throughout the years in part because of development processes, procedures, and practices established from past successes and failures. This institutional knowledge, generated over time and embedded within both documents and people, has also meant that mission implementation has relied upon existing methods with a proven track record to manage risk within prescribed cost boundaries. As one looks, however, toward the future of sustainable space missions, particularly those that will use new mission architectures, lessons learned from the small satellite mission community offer potential paths to reduce risk, lessen costs, increase implementation speed, and manage complexity while leveraging new technology advances. We summarize the outcomes from a NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD)-led study that explored how optimal practices from small satellite (SmallSat) and Class-D missions could be applicable to large mission development. Performed over a period of 12 months, a broad team of NASA, academic, and industry experts consisting of project managers, chief engineers, standing review board members, program managers, and system engineers identified key findings complied from over 240 interview comments from 37 interviewees. These participants have worked on Class A, B, C, D, and SmallSat missions that have flown throughout the solar system. Their findings fell into the broad categories of reuse and commercial-off-the-shelf parts (COTS), vendor and partner relationships, documentation, engineering and design, tailoring, mentoring, decision making, team communication, roles and responsibilities, review board practices, and risk management. Seven main findings were identified that span the full mission lifecycle. While some of these findings demonstrated alignment with other prior studies, such as the NASA SMD Large Mission Study [1] and Psyche Independent Review Board Assessment report [2], the details of all the findings and recommended actions provide new insights given their genesis in how small missions have developed unique approaches to mission success by the nature of the constraints through which they must be developed. From this perspective and these observations we describe deeper strategies that can be learned from the small mission approach that can be leveraged for large mission implementation.