Aerospace Concurrent Engineering Design Teams: Current State, Next Steps and a Vision for the Future

Over the past sixteen years, government aerospace agencies and aerospace industry have developed and evolved operational concurrent design teams to create novel spaceflight mission concepts and designs. These capabilities and teams, however, have evolved largely independently. In today’s environment of increasingly complex missions with limited budgets it is becoming readily apparent that both implementing organizations and today’s concurrent engineering teams will need to interact more often than they have in the past. This will require significant changes in the current state of practice. This paper documents the findings from a concurrent engineering workshop held in August 2010 to identify the key near term improvement areas for concurrent engineering capabilities and challenges to the long-term advancement of concurrent engineering practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of a proposed vision for the evolution of these teams over the next decade.