Reliability, Maintainability, and Availability –Consideration during the Design Phase in Ground Systems to Ensure Successful Launch Support

Reliability, Maintainability, and Availability –Consideration during the Design Phase in Ground Systems to Ensure Successful Launch Support

Cocoa Beach

The future of Space Exploration includes missions to the moon, asteroids, Mars, and beyond. To get there, the mission concept is to launch multiple launch vehicles months, even years apart. In order to achieve this, launch vehicles, payloads (satellites and crew capsules), and ground systems must be highly reliable and/or available, to include maintenance concepts and procedures in the event of a launch scrub.

In order to achieve this high probability of mission success, Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO) has allocated Reliability, Maintainability, and Availability (RMA) requirements to all hardware and software required for both launch success and, in the event of a launch scrub, required to support a repair of the ground systems, launch vehicle, or payload. This is done concurrently with the design process (30/60/90 reviews).

The GSDO RMA team performs analysis to ensure that the designs are meeting the requirements and to capture lessons learned from previous programs (both manned and unmanned). The types of RMA analyses include: Reliability Block Diagram (RBD), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA), Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), Component Failure Rate Determination – Weibull Analysis, Maintainability Analysis, and Component Burn-in Test time Requirements.

This presentation would go over the basics of all RMA analyses performed and include results and examples of how designs and launch probabilities were improved by utilizing the RMA analyses.