The Cost of Unreliability in the Avionics Suite of a Launch Vehicle

The main objective of the Advanced Launch System (ALS) program is to realize a substantial reduction in recurring launch costs over present launch systems. A methodology is presented for assessing the impact of the reliability of the avionics suite on the recurring launch cost of the ALS. The methodology is illustrated by focusing on two architectures. The first is a distillation of a typical architecture for this type of application. The second is a simplified implementation of the Advanced Information Processing System (AIPS) technology developed at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. Both architectures utilize redundancy of hardware to tolerate faults. The key contributors to the cost of unreliability are identified and modeled utilizing Markov modeling techniques for each of the two architectures. The results are presented along with the more traditional costs for these avionics suites.