ABSTRACT
Civil Space includes those enterprises that support the advancement in knowledge and technological capabilities that are government funded and are not part of the national security activities. The programs supported by NASA, NOAA, the USGS, and the NSF range from research grants as small as a few tens of thousands of dollars and months in duration to programs costing multiple billions of dollars and requiring decades to complete. This chapter focuses on larger programs that either respond to an existing program request for new ideas or a program that the civilian space agencies identifies as requiring the unique skills of an organization and directs that work to it on a sole source basis. During the proposal preparation, the tasks must be defined at a top level sufficient to prepare an initial cost estimate and the core team must agree to the tasks, the resources needed to perform the tasks, and the schedule for completion.
