Development of Space Shuttle Telemetry Station Software

www.stsc.hill.af.mil 15 Daniel Golden, NASA Administrator, in his strategic outlook for 1999 [1] provides a statement of strategic intent for the agency. In this statement he outlines a three-part mission in which “Technology Development and Transfer” is a cornerstone of the mission for the agency in 2000. This is consistent with the 1999 external assessment [2] in which the administration places priority on the promotion of “high technology for economic growth through effective partnerships.” The prime Space Flight Operations Contract, SFOC (reference: Contract NAS 9-20000) awarded to United Space Alliance, section G-14 and G-15, requires the contractor to provide a portion of the contract funds to small business and to support the “Government’s Technology Transfer Program.” This new development method is an example of how USA is exploring new ways to increase the marketability of technology developed on the space program while decreasing Space Shuttle Program development and operating costs. This new collaborative development method involves adopting a software application counterpart available in industry to provide baseline functionality and developing additional capabilities required for the upgrade or replacement system in collaboration with the software vendor. Applying this new development method more effectively leveraged technology and expertise available in industry to reduce initial software acquisition cost and time to market, while providing a superior product to space shuttle operations. Also, the technology developed is built on the state-of-the-art rather than reinventing the stateof-the-art, making the technology developed more valuable to industry and the American public. The project defined a software development turnaround in terms of key project management metrics (i.e. cost, schedule, and technical). Turnaround was defined as a 50 percent reduction in anticipated software development labor and time to market. The improvement in the technical merit was a little harder to quantify. Two surveys were performed as part of a comparative analysis. Three key technical categories were defined and a turnaround was defined as a marked improvement in two of the three. The categories were marketability, software product quality, and maintainability. Attributes were defined within each category. The first survey was designed to determine the importance of the attributes within each category. The second survey was performed after software development was completed and scored the delivered product against the most likely outcome of continued development on the custom code. The results of these surveys were organized and presented in a Kepner Tregoe decision matrix for comparative analysis [3]. A marked improvement was defined as 100 percent improvement in absolute score within a category.