Subsea applications such as riser monitoring have long used engineering techniques and practices taken from the space flight and aerospace engineering domains. Both disciplines deal with high-value, mission-critical components and systems where failure is not an option. For this reason, risk management dominates all other factors when designing components and operating systems. As the aerospace community has known for years, effective risk management is made possible by collecting more of the right data. Distributed fiber optic sensing systems, which have been deployed in both space flight and aerospace applications, is also ideally suited for Subsea Riser Monitoring because it enables the advanced collection of real-time tension, torsion, and shape information.