The aerospace industry has been investing for decades in ways to improve its efficiency in estimating the project life cycle cost (LCC). One of the major focuses in the LCC is the cost/prediction of aerospace instruments done during the early conceptual design phase of the project. The accuracy of early cost predictions affects the project scheduling and funding, and it is often the major cause for project cost overruns.

The prediction of instruments' cost is based on the statistical analysis of these independent variables: Mass (kg), Power (watts), Instrument Type, Technology Readiness Level (TRL), Destination: earth orbiting or planetary, Data rates (kbps), Number of bands, Number of channels, Design life (months), and Development duration (months).

This author is proposing a cost prediction approach of aerospace instruments based on these statistical analyses: Clustering Analysis, Principle Components Analysis (PCA), Bootstrap, and multiple regressions (both linear and non-linear). In the proposed approach, the Cost Estimating Relationship (CER) will be developed for the dependent variable Instrument Cost by using a combination of multiple independent variables. “The Full Model” will be developed and executed to estimate the full set of nine variables. The SAS program, Excel, Automatic Cost Estimating Integrate Tool (ACEIT) and Minitab are the tools to aid the analysis. Through the analysis, the cost drivers will be identified which will help develop an ultimate cost estimating software tool for the Instrument Cost prediction and optimization of future missions.