Estimate Early and Estimate Often: How Your Concurrent Engineering Design Team Can Bootstrap Your Organizations Programmatic Capabilities

What do you do when it is necessary to generate reasonable cost estimates at the earliest Concept Maturity Levels and you have never flown any similar missions before? This paper describes the current and future Team X and A-Team cost processes and methods, how they are being used to expand our data frontiers, cost modeling capabilities and how this enables the ability to estimate early and estimate often.