Developmental space-system elicitation techniques for risk-informed design practices

The environment designers must conquer to realize crewed space-exploration initiatives presents a heavily mass constrained design space coupled with immense consequences given hardware failures. The balance of these two highly dependent design elements throughout the design process requires insights provided through reliability and risk assessments at early stages of system concept development. If reliability impacts are not analyzed, designers often apply too much redundancy to ensure crew safety or apply too little redundancy or failure mitigation hardware to ensure they meet mass requirements imposed by mission designers. Understanding what the addition of mass to a design is buying you, from a performance as well as reliability perspective, can ensure design trades are being made with a risk-informed perspective. The technique discussed in this paper conveys a method of risk-informed design that is guided by system design documents and based heavily on face-to-face designer interaction and elicitation. This approach proved very efficient, as designers were closely engaged early in design cycles and forced to focus on reliability strategies that were heavily influenced and implemented by the designer´s own expertise.