It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem:OperationsCost & SchedulePerformanceTraining & SupportTestDisposalManufacturingSE integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a team effort forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production to operation.

I would add to this the lack of effective SE as an even more fundament problem in today's development environment.

Without effective systems engineering, there can be no project management, because there is nothing to manage: projects are akin to building an airplane in flight, with no requirements, metrics, architecture, testing, modeling, feasibility studies, or modeling of alternatives.

Organizations need to budget approximately 20% of a project or program budget for effective SE.

Because of the expense, companies and government agencies are foregoing systems engineering as a necessary aspect of complex, high, visibility efforts, with expensive and often disastrous results.As a CIO/CTO, you need to ask yourself why so many projects are outright failures, or fail to deliver functionality as promised, or become so expensive that any cost benefits from new efficiencies the system provides are never realized, and why the people who have to use the system become frustrated and leave.

Often it's because SE is seen as an unnecessary extravagance, that the coders, database developers, and infrastructure team can handle themselves.Here's a question: If you were building your dream home, would you just let the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons, HVAC technicians, and roofers design your home as they were building it?

The space race is back on, but this time it’s closer to home: A number of U.S. companies are vying to become the first to return Americans to crewed launches, after an eight-year hiatus marked by the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.

Lockheed Martin is one of that very small group, through its partnership with Boeing on the United Launch Alliance, and through its development of the Orion crew capsule, which ticked off an important checkbox in July when it was confirmed complete and ready for mission prep.

Lockheed Martin is at the center of it all, no matter which way you slice it, and that’s why it’s great news that CEO Marillyn Hewson will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 in San Francisco to talk all about her company’s work with NASA, their progress on bringing back America’s crewed launch capabilities and their designs on the Moon and beyond.

Even after Orion flies with astronauts aboard for the first time, which is currently set to happen sometime next year, Lockheed Martin has yet more ambitious plans — including developing an “early Gateway” to precede the full-scale Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway that NASA aims to install orbiting the Moon to provide a more permanent base of operations for long-term lunar operations.

Lockheed Martin has been in the space business since the 1950s, but private and commercial interest in space has changed a lot in the ensuing years.

We’ll talk about what the growing commercial interest in low Earth orbit and beyond, and the increasing number of launch and service providers, means for Lockheed and its evolution.