European and international verification and testing standards

Standardization is a key aspect in all the production business finalized to the optimization of the product development and cost. In this frame, several international organizations are reviewing old standards and initiatives are on going to develop a set of new standards in support of all the space activities. All these initiatives, among others, include the revision and the definition of a set of verification and testing standards and some of them were already published whereas others are under writing and public review. Scope of this paper is to present the status of these initiatives, the difficulties to harmonize standards and methodologies which reflect different government and industrial points of view. Differences in requirement definition and proposals for further optimization are presented on the basis of Alenia Spazio experience in supporting the above initiatives.