A Case Study in NASA-DoD - The Black Vault

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Nonrecurring Costs. Nonrecurring costs were estimated for the
STPSS and L-AEM only; for the other spacecraft those costs would not be
borne by USAF and would be irrelevant in comparisons of USAF outlays.
The SAMSO Unmanned Spacecraft Cost Abdel provided the basic estimating
equations, which were derived from a sample of up to 28
space programs
over the period 1959-1972.
Some spacecraft had been deleted from the
sample because they were developed "under tight monetary constraints
and under a philosophy that required the use of proven technology."
STPSS is precisely such a program, so the output of the SAMSO model
was modified to fit the Space Test Program Office philosophy.
An initial assumption was that the first spacecraft manufactured
and tested would be a flight model, i.e., there would be no qualification
test model. It was later decided that a qualification test model
would be desirable, and the estimates weremodified to reflect that
decision. The higher estimate is the one included in the final program
costs.
For the L-AEM nonrecurring costs the basic estimate provided by
Boeing was scaled up to include a test model, but as shown in Table 8,
the difference between L-AEM and STPSS nonrecurring costs is striking.
When L-AEM costs are estimated in the same manner as those for the
STPSS, the differences are far less.
It is possible to construct a
rationale for some degree of difference, e.g., L-AEM would be a followon
to AEM, and there would be some transfer of learning. Also, STPSS
consists of modules that are developed separately, then integrated,
and each module is essentially a separate spacecraft. Configuration
changes in L-AEM are handled on the basis of different kits rather
than different modules. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the
estimates based on the SAMSO model and those based on Boeing figures
is too great to be ignored. In the discussion of program costs in
Sec. IV the impact of that discrepancy on the issue of spacecraft selection
will be examined.
Sample size varied for each spacecraft subsystem.