Reliability and Maintainability — Key to launch Vehicle affordability

R&M is extremely critical to build safe, reliable, and cost effective systems. The challenges of today´s unmanned and ma nned space flight programs demand the most efficient use of our technical knowledge base to develop cost effective and affordable systems. An efficient reliability and maintainability program is essential to meet the challenges for the nation´s Space Program. This paper discusses the role of Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) and its potential impact on operational availability, and affordability. This includes discussion of the R&M elements that need to be addressed and the R&M analyses that need to be performed in order to support an affordable system design. The paper also provides some lessons learned on the impact of R&M on safety and affordability. Lessons learned discussed in this paper clearly demonstrate the importance of reliability and maintainability engineering in designing and operating safe and affordable launch systems.