| Abstract: | Using economic incentives to control costs is a new concept for space missions. The basic tenets of market-based approaches run counter to typical centralized management techniques often utilized for complex space missions. NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn used a market trading system to assist the Science Instrument Manager in guiding the development of the spacecraft's science payload. This system allowed science instrument teams to trade resources among themselves to best manage their resources (mass, power, data rate, and budget). Thus, Cassini Project management was no longer responsible for adjudicating and reallocating resources that result from instrument development problems. Instrument teams were responsible for directly managing their resources and if they ran into a development problem it was their responsibility to resolve their problem by descoping or through the use of a 'resource exchange.' Under the trading system, instrument cost growth was less than 1% and the total payload mass was under its allocation by 7%. This result is in stark contrast to the 50%–100% increases in these resources on past missions. |
