The Importance of manufacturing for future missions

Future missions, from the smallest suborbital mission to Probes and the Great Observatories, must maximize the science that will be achieved by optimizing the observatory architecture and performance. Manufacturing readiness is a valuable tool that can be used early in the mission lifecycle to provide an initial understanding of the observatory attributes needed to meet the science requirements, achievable performance tolerances (which informs the system error budget), and potential failure modes related to a particular architecture or technology all from a manufacturing perspective. Ultimately, manufacturing readiness provides critical insight into observatory architecture trades at every level (system, subsystem, and component-level), elucidating a path that optimizes observatory performance and highlights potential science opportunities.