About one-quarter of all space-borne sensors being developed for NASA and Security Space applications are overrunning their budget and schedule allocations by factors of 2X or more. A substantial improvement in the cycle time of development for these systems is needed while retaining adequate system performance levels with high reliability. Collaborative engineering practices based on new abstract modeling technology promise significant reductions in project cost and delivery time.

This presentation describes how a multi-disciplinary design team from The Aerospace Corporation utilized a unified performance engineering workspace powered by abstract modeling to support a collaborative engineering process for the design of space optical systems while still leveraging their off-the-shelf CAD and CAE (simulation) tools for evaluating structural, thermal and optical performance. The author will present results of use of this approach on a current flight hardware program, with an emphasis on the significant productivity improvements that were realized. Comparison of simulation results to empirical test results will also be discussed.