A Reliability, Maintainability, And Safety Model To Support The Assessment Of Space Vehicles

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 vehicle's 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.