A Case Study in NASA-DoD - The Black Vault

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IV.
STANDARD SPACECRAFT ACQUISITIONS FOR THE AIR FORCE:
PROGRAM COSTS AND CONCLUSIONS
PROGRAM COSTS
In this section, the total program costs are discussed for a variety
of procurerent options, each of which is capable of performing all of
the Air Force Space Test Program missions. For this constant-performance
comparison, program cost is used as the principal measure for distinguishing
among procurement options. The analysis described in this
section was accomplished in two phases. In the first phase, procurement
options using the AEM, STPSS, and MMS spacecraft were compared. In the
second phase, additional procurement options using the L-AEM spacecraft
were defined partly as a result of the outcome of the first phase of this
analysis; for that reason the sequential nature of the analysis is preserved
in the discussion that follows. Finally, the conclusions are presented
for the case study of the Air Force standard spacecraft procurement
decision. All costs are in millions of 1976 dollars.
Nominal Case
A nominal case was defined as a baseline for estimating the cost
to carry out the Space Test Program missions during th' 1980-1990
period, and a number of excursions from that baseline were made to test
the sensitivity of the results to assumptions about the number of payloads,
payloads per spacecraft, etc.
The nominal case includes all three
versions of the STPSS. The nominal program size is 114 payloads, with a
maximum of 6 payloads per spacecraft.
In keeping with the Air Force
*
As mentioned in Sec. III, the Work Statement for this study indicated
that the number of payloads (defined as the set of experiments
combined on one page of the bluebook)( 2 6 ) to be flown per spacecraft
could vary from a combination of 1 large payload plus 4 small payloads
to as many as 12 small payloads. In Sec. III it was found that for the
nominal size program (114 payloads), the average number of payloads per
spacecraft would be about 6 but that it might increase to 7 or 8. For
this study, this assumption has been treated as a maximum value rather
than as an average value while allocating the Space Test Program payloads
to specific spacecraft; this will be discussed later in this
section when the sensitivity excursions are described.