Engineering a Successful Mission: Lessons from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Schedule pressure is common in the commercial world, where late delivery of a product means delayed income and loss of profit. 12 Research spacecraft developed by NASA, on the other hand, tend to be driven by the high cost of launch vehicles and the public scrutiny of failure-- the primary driver is ensuring proper operation in space for a system that cannot be retrieved for repair. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) development faced both schedule pressure and high visibility. The team had to balance the strong push to meet a launch date against the need to ensure that this first mission for Exploration succeeded. This paper will provide an overview of the mission from concept through its first year of operation and explore some of the challenges the systems engineering team faced taking a mission from preliminary design review to pre-ship review in 3 years.