The ground team that has responsibility for a spacecraft and its operations, beginning from when the mission is planned, with the team discussing the vehicle and its instruments with contractors.

The spacecraft team is part of the flight team, which operates under the mission control team, and it also draws up the spacecraft event file (SEF) that is used to compile a mission's integrated sequence of events (ISOE).

NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter space probe, launched on 11 December 1998, was lost because its spacecraft team and mission navigation team did not notice that different measurements (imperial and metric) were being used.