Spacecraft Reliability and Multi-State Failures

A Statistical Approach

The aerospace community has long recognized and repeatedly emphasizes the importance of reliability for space systems. Despite this, little has been published in book form on the topic. Spacecraft Reliability and Multi-state Failures addresses this gap in the literature, offering a unique focus on spacecraft reliability based on extensive statistical analysis of system and subsystem anomalies and failures.

The authors provide new results pertaining to spacecraft reliability based on extensive statistical analysis of on-orbit anomaly and failure data that will be particularly useful to spacecraft manufacturers and designers, for example in guiding satellite (and subsystem) test and screening programs and providing an empirical basis for subsystem redundancy and reliability growth plans. The authors develop nonparametric results and parametric models of spacecraft and spacecraft subsystem reliability and multi-state failures, quantify the relative contribution of each subsystem to the failure of the satellites thus identifying the subsystems that drive spacecraft unreliability, and propose advanced stochastic modeling and analysis tools for the reliability and survivability of spacecraft and space-based networks.

Spacecraft Reliability and Multi-state Failures

• provides new nonparametric results pertaining to spacecraft reliability based on extensive statistical analysis of on-orbit anomaly and failure data;
• develops parametric models of spacecraft and spacecraft subsystem reliability and multi-state failures
• quantifies the relative contribution of each subsystem to the failure of the satellites
• proposes advanced stochastic modeling and analysis tools for the reliability and survivability of spacecraft and space-based networks.
• provides a dedicated treatment of the reliability and subsystem anomalies of communication spacecraft in geostationary orbit.