Jun 3 1999
From The Space Library
NASA announced that spacecraft engineers who had worked on NASA's new Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) had won an American Electronics Association Technical Achievement Award for the "development of a spacecraft at a record-setting pace of one year." Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation of Boulder, Colorado, had built the satellite for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), assembling the QuikSCAT faster than any construction of a spacecraft since the 1958 Explorer I satellite. To accomplish this fast pace, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center had developed a new procurement system called the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition process, to accelerate NASA's purchase procedure. The new acquisition process had enabled NASA to take advantage of "low-cost commercial technology from the burgeoning spacecraft industry," to develop satellite systems such as the QuikSCAT. NASA had been able to reduce the time needed to select a contractor and to initiate spacecraft development, from one year to 30 days. Chip Barnes, a QuikSCAT spacecraft system engineer at Ball Aerospace commented that the production had involved a "remarkable effort to get the spacecraft built, integrated, and tested in an 11-month time frame.”
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