Right-Sizing Life Cycle Logistics for Space Systems

Life Cycle Logistics is the planning, development, implementation, and management of a comprehensive, affordable, and effective system support strategy, and is accomplished through a rigorous, tailorable, and systematic product support planning process. A system’s life cycle begins with the development of user needs and includes three major phases: Acquisition (design, develop, test, produce, deploy), Sustainment (operations and support), and Disposal. The logistics approach during this life cycle evolves over time, from “Plan for Support” to “Design for Support” to “Support the Design”. Historically, space-based system program managers have paid inadequate attention to supportability in favor of meeting capability requirements or for basic program survival. This acquisition program trend has resulted in a sustainment community unaware of and unprepared for the resources and related costs to sufficiently sustain their systems with available resources. The Department of Defense has specific guidance mandating life cycle logistics approaches, but that has not fully translated to the application of those principals, particularly for space-based systems. In contrast, NASA has recognized the need to set clear life cycle logistics guidance for acquisition and sustainment program managers, but this need has not yet translated into published policy. And, most recently, commercial providers are more and more being looked at to provide space services, with the primary expected benefit being lower life cycle costs. Although these commercial systems are being developed with a significant investment in taxpayer dollars, there has not been a similar level of investment in life cycle logistics oversight by government program managers. The expected result of not making life cycle logistics central to a program’s approach is that those considerations become left to program managers or staffs who are typically not subject matter experts intimately familiar with life cycle logistics principals or benefits. The life cycle of many space systems looks different from many DoD earth-based systems. Some are “one-shot-and-done” systems (e.g. expendable launch vehicles). Some extend beyond the practical reach of the system sustainer as soon as it launches into space (e.g. satellites, unmanned space exploration craft). Although the life cycle costs of such systems are more biased towards acquisition vs. sustainment, such systems usually entail more than the spacecraft itself; they often include earth-based control systems, ground processing systems, launch systems, etc., which have more typical lifecycle cost profiles. So, although there has been the temptation to not fully consider these types of space-based systems with a full lifecycle logistics perspective, falling to that temptation is a shortsighted approach to total life cycle system management. Although we believe it is clear that life cycle logistics principals should be a central part of all space-based system acquisitions, it is also true that there is wide variance among those systems in how and where they are operated, their life cycle cost distribution, and other factors that suggest that the application of life cycle logistics should be tailored based on those factors…but never ignored. This paper reviews (1) life cycle logistics principals, (2) the degree to which those principals have been applied historically during space-based systems acquisitions, (3) factors that influence the degree to which life cycle logistics should be applied, and (4) recommendations on how to approach the application of life cycle logistics for a range of typical space-based systems.