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MIDAS is a new distributed environment which was specifically designed for use by a team of spacecraft designers. It allows them to perform the following tasks ( I ) enter in the most natural graphical way their methodology for designing their element of the project and interconnect the elements together (2) use as input the requirements levied on each element by the and by the elements being designed by other design engineers (3) use a heterogene~us et of commercial design tools such as NASTRAN and SPICE, resident on different computing platforms, to be automatically executed as part of the certification and eventual execution of the methodology (4) use, in addition, userdefined FORTRAN or "C" codes (5) run on a variety of platforms from parallel computers such as the ~ e l t a o r Cray, to workstations, personal computers and Macintoshes ( 6 ) allow algorithms for the multidisciplinary optimization of the system to be investigated by allowing the operator to compare different techniques for searching the solution space. A group of JPL spacecraft designers designed a mock space project using MIDAS and the results are presented.