 subunit 1.2, the need for systems engineering. So large space projects struggle with cost, schedule, technical performance, and they also struggle with the people side of this. Aging workforce, skill retention makes it difficult if you don't have the experienced personnel you need to make the system come together. So space system design today requires more systems engineering. Systems are becoming more complex and growing in size, as you see on this chart. New space systems are likely to include a lot of new technology, so you see technology development on this slide, as well as existing technology. So reuse of existing designs, incorporation of commercial off-the-shelf subsystems, which you would think would make it simpler, but sometimes it's hard to integrate together commercial products into a new system. It also has a lot more people involved where you have institutional partners from different groups involved, more stakeholders, more people on the team, additional oversight from customers. You have many different subsystem vendors, you're buying and purchasing things from different groups. There's a lot of ambiguity sometimes when you set out to build a big large system on what the system should be able to do and how it should perform. There's a lot of technical risks involved that could end up costing you money and schedule in the long run. A lot of different things that you have to take into account when developing a system and having a system engineering process is going to help get you organized to make sure that you can take all that into account and still be successful, staying on budget, staying on cost, and getting the technical product that you need at the end. When you are working a system engineering, the goal is to work across disciplines. There are thermal engineers on any given project, there are propulsion engineers and power engineers, but it's the system engineers that really sit above them and make sure that all the elements, the pieces of that system, are going to come together to operate properly to fulfill the mission. That's where system engineering comes in handy. System engineers also do things like look at all the different risks that are involved in building the spacecraft. You'll have a whole course element on risk management. So the idea that the system engineers have to look and say, as we're developing this project, what am I most worried about? What keeps me up at night? And what can I do to reduce that risk, that thing that's worrying me? So are there actions I can take? Maybe I can change the design to make it less risky for the mission. Maybe I can use a different technology where I think I have a potential for the technology to have a failure after launch. Maybe I can add a redundant capability somewhere where I'm worried that the system might not work operationally and that would cause a failure of the mission. So the system engineer is working through, looking at how will the system operate and all through the design phase, looking to see how to improve and perfect the designs. So Space Systems Engineering is built a lot on the lessons of the past. Systems or pieces of the system will be built by different subsystem groups. And in a lot of cases when you put those subsystems together, those components, the system might not perform all the functions that it was supposed to. So historically systems built by different groups that weren't coordinated well together and didn't have an overarching systems engineering discipline to coordinate them often broke at the interfaces when you tried to plug all the pieces together. And they were also plagued by a lot of cost overruns where as you tried to pull the pieces together, you had to spend a lot of additional money to do rework and redesign and to make sure those interfaces would work together. Systems built by different subsystems groups in the end result in unusable systems. Either they become too expensive, they run over on their schedule, they technically don't meet their objectives one way or the other, they become unusable systems. So a good example is here you see a picture of a bridge that was built by a lot of talented engineers, structural engineers and mechanical engineers. And a lot of analysis was done on how to make sure the bridge could support the mass of the cars that were going to be going over it. But in the end, there wasn't enough coordination between all the disciplines and so what you see here is that a bridge was built without the thought of how that bridge might resonate with the wind that was going to be blowing in that area through that gorge. And you see some resonance that ended up being a destructive force for the bridge. So again, needing to come together as a team, needing to make sure you take everything into consideration and see the problem from all the different perspectives is definitely what a system engineer is going to help do on a project like this. So large projects without coordination and discipline, as we talked about, they can lead to wasted effort where people are maybe working to different ideas. Maybe you all kind of went away into your corners to help develop your part of the system and you had different ideas about what the system should do and how it should work and how to fit together. So inconsistent designs, conflicting interfaces where you built your computer box but it doesn't plug on to the sensors that need to send the computer data because you didn't ever talk to the other group. Duplication of effort where different groups assume that they're responsible for something and don't coordinate. And discipline, systematic approach. There's no overarching way of looking at this system to make sure it's going to work together. So here's an example. If you look back in history, there are many. This is the Future imagery architecture satellite. It's a $5 billion spy satellite. It fell behind schedule early on. And you see after six years and the spending of over $4 billion, the system was canceled. It was canceled in 2005 and at this point, again, a lot of investment had been made. A lot of engineering work had been done. And when people went back and one of the big things about system engineering is to go back and do lessons learned. Why did the system fail? And in this case, why did the system get so far out of control that it went way over budget and got way behind schedule? So when they looked back at this, they looked and saw that there was an unrealistic budget set out along the way. And that's sometimes due to things like optimism on the part of the development team. Everyone thinks they can get it done with less money than they really need and they run into issues because they haven't done proper analysis up front. Lack of realistic cost estimates along the way. No significant R&D investment, research and development. So they weren't doing enough investment in key technologies that they would need to run the satellite. Design changes coming from external stakeholders. Here you can see from Washington, whether it's Congress or the Office of Management and Budget, many different people are stakeholders in a big government project like this and will help in defining requirements that may change the design over time. Inexperienced contractor, complex design and infeasible manufacturing, unrealistic schedule, cutbacks on testing, lack of government oversight. Many different rationales for why this project ended up failing. And so there's a really good summary here in the New York Times article and here you see the quote that another factor in the failure of this project was the decline of American expertise in system engineering. The art and science of managing complex engineering projects to weigh the risks, gauge feasibility, test components and ensure that all the pieces are going to come together smoothly. And that is a great definition of what system engineering is all about and how critical it is to these kind of large projects. And you can read this article here. If you click on the next slide, you'll see you can click here to go ahead and read the full article to get a better understanding of all the factors that led to the issues with this project. 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