telephoned Walter Raird personally since he and I had worked together on a number of other Skunk Works projects. He immediately agreed to pick up his end of the log. [...] Other measures taken saved the government at least $50 million on costs. This application of Skunk Works methods completed in nine months what had been scheduled for 18. Some 350 draw ings were created against a projected 3,900. and quality control personnel were slashed to 69. Tooling costs were reduced from a projected $2,000,000 to $150,000. and procedures were established to turn out design drawings in a single day instead of one month. These measures demonstrated results. In the first twelve launches, reliability was 96.2 percent. This approach has been effectively used by the University of Surrey (Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.) in the development and launch of five small spacecraft in the UoSAT series. The UoSAT-3 spacecraft, for example, involved a total program length of 2 years and cost some £350K (1989) or about 600 KAU (1992). The UoSAT-3 and 5 spacecraft are the most sophisticated store- and-forward spacecraft ever launched. According to Jacky Radbone of SST. [2] As may have been expected, there is no single, or simple, answer to how to build inexpensive spacecraft. It relies on a small, motivated team who will apply ‘good engineering' in its broadest sense to the project. This means continuous scrutiny of all aspects - technical and managerial - throughout the programme to constantly trade-off the cost versus the performance to match the specific mission objectives. Whether such a management approach would work within the European space context is debatable. However, the incentive seems clear - such an approach would enable cost and schedule savings, allowing a more advanced and expensive follow-on experiment to be undertaken sooner than otherwise possible.
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