1. Purpose and scope
This stage turns a customer's mission, or a class of missions the business wants to serve, into requirements precise enough to drive every later decision. A space part is judged against an environment rather than a datasheet alone: the orbit or trajectory, the mission duration, the temperature range, vacuum and outgassing limits, launch vibration and shock, and above all the radiation the part will see. The stage ends when those requirements are agreed with the customer and baselined.
Three things set this stage apart from a commercial product definition. First, the radiation environment is modelled from public environment models and turned into a total ionising dose requirement, a displacement damage requirement where the part is sensitive to it, and single-event requirements for upsets, transients, functional interrupts and latch-up, each with an agreed design margin. Second, the quality level and the qualification framework are chosen now, because they fix the screening, the package options and the audits for the life of the part. Third, the part and its technical data receive a first export classification, which decides who may work on the design and which customers can be served.
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