A reliability, maintainability, andsafety model to support theassessment of space vehicles

摘要

Purpose – The focus of this paper is on reliability and availability design goals. It aims to provide top-level estimates of the safety and maintainability of future spacecraft systems. Design/methodology/approach – The developed design tool uses basic reliability principles to estimate the probability of a safe mission and the need for repairs/replacement during ground processing, before launch and start of mission, based on the characteristics of the vehicles main systems: the number of subsystems, the mean time to repair, and the per subsystem average reliability. Findings – A simple reliability, maintainability and safety model is developed to support the top-level design process of future space transportation vehicles. It also describes how the developed design tool uses various sensitivity analysis functions to improve design decisions.Originality/value – The goal of the developed tool is to provide engineers/vehicle developers during the early stages of design with a tool that demonstrates the effect on maintainability of improving component reliability and reducing the number of components.