CDC conducts studies for a variety of organizations, and the studies span a broad range of programs. Congressional staffers and senior Department of Defense officials suggested that the Space Based Infrared System Low mission could be combined with another program on the same bus. A quick study by the CDC System Architecture Team showed, however, that the total cost of the combined missions would exceed the costs of keeping them separate.
A CDC study of the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System showed that proposed mission requirements would have to be reduced in order to meet cost and risk constraints. As a result, the Air Force Space Test and Experimentation Program Office rewrote the mission and technical requirements. The program recently received funding, and CDC team members participated in source selection.
Subjects of CDC design studies for the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center have included the Space Based Radar and the Global Multi-Mission Space Platform. The requirements for contractor feasibility studies for the space platform are based directly on results from the CDC study.
The CDC Ground Systems Team designed several architectures for the Air Force Satellite Control Network. The network needed to compare its present acquisition plans to alternatives proposed by outside organizations. One alternative proposed using commercial service providers for most ground-to-space communications; another proposed moving most of the network's communications to space-based relays. CDC studies helped the customer understand key features and drawbacks of the alternatives.
The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has asked Aerospace to help develop a CDC-like design center as a learning tool for use by graduate students.