Mission Assurance Guide

The primary purpose of the Mission Assurance Guide (MAG) is to provide practical guidance to personnel of The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) and, in general, National Security Space (NSS) program office personnel, who are responsible for executing mission assurance (MA) functions that are key to achieving program and mission success.

The Aerospace program office, engineering and laboratory personnel routinely carry out MA functions within the scope of the General Systems Engineering and Integration (GSE&I) role that Aerospace fulfills in support and on behalf of its customers. Although the initial motivation for the guide was to directly address such Aerospace MA functions, its content has been produced and assembled with the intent that it be generally suitable for use by personnel belonging to any organization that has GSE&I and MA responsibilities. The main limitation of scope of the guide is determined by the underlying assumption of separation between acquisition authority functions, i.e., “government-side” acquisition management functions, and prime contractor system design and production functions, as normally defined in standard NSS space program contractual stipulations. Thus, the guide addresses MA functions and tasks that are to be carried out by an NSS acquisition-authority government organization, or by a GSE&I-support entity that carries out these functions and tasks on behalf of the acquisition entity. It does not concern itself with MA functions that are typically carried out by the production entity, i.e. the prime contractor that is responsible for developing and executing the NSS system design and production activities. Certain prime contractor tasks and products, however, are addressed and identified as “enabling tasks and products” in those frequent cases in which their execution and completion constitutes a necessary prerequisite and point of departure for the execution of acquisition-entity MA tasks.