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A cost assessment of reliability requirements for shuttle-recoverable experiments

Author
Campbell, J. W.
Published
Nov 1, 1975.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Online Version

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Unclassified, Unlimited, Publicly available.
Free-to-read Unrestricted online access
Summary
The relaunching of unsuccessful experiments or satellites will become a real option with the advent of the space shuttle. An examination was made of the cost effectiveness of relaxing reliability requirements for experiment hardware by allowing more than one flight of an experiment in the event of its failure. Any desired overall reliability or probability of mission success can be acquired by launching an experiment with less reliability two or more times if necessary. Although this procedure leads to uncertainty in total cost projections, because the number of flights is not known in advance, a considerable cost reduction can sometimes be achieved. In cases where reflight costs are low relative to the experiment's cost, three flights with overall reliability 0.9 can be made for less than half the cost of one flight with a reliability of 0.9. An example typical of shuttle payload cost projections is cited where three low reliability flights would cost less than $50 million and a single high reliability flight would cost over $100 million. The ratio of reflight cost to experiment cost is varied and its effect on the range in total cost is observed. An optimum design reliability selection criterion to minimize expected cost is proposed, and a simple graphical method of determining this reliability is demonstrated.
Other Subject(s)
Collection
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) Collection.
Note
Document ID: 19760003402.
Accession ID: 76N10490.
NASA-TN-D-8016.
L-10245.
Terms of Use and Reproduction
No Copyright.
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