Mission Operations Cost Estimation Tool (MOCET) 2021/2022 Capability Updates

The Mission Operations Cost Estimation Tool, or MOCET, is a model developed by The Aerospace Corporation in partnership with NASA's Science Office for Mission Assessments (SOMA). MOCET provides the capability to generate cost estimates for the operational, or Phase E, portion of full NASA space science missions. MOCET has become one of the top NASA tools for estimating mission operations costs due to its simplicity, versatility, and accuracy. MOCET has been used in NASA full Announcement of Opportunity (AO) competitions by proposers and evaluators since its initial release in 2015. The MOCET team has worked vigorously to further improve the model by actively demonstrating the tool to NASA program offices and general users to address concerns from all points of view. MOCET is now a widely accepted and critical model in the NASA community and was awarded the NASA Cost and Schedule Team award in 2017 and received honorable mention in the 2021 NASA Software of the Year (SOY) competition. In this paper, the authors will discuss capability updates made to MOCET in 2021 as well as planned updates for 2022. These updates include additional mission data to update the existing cost estimating relationships (CERs), enhancements to the tool capabilities, and related studies for planned future enhancements. We will also provide a status of the MOCET user community and how it has grown since the initial release of the tool.