A Method for Allocating Reliability and Cost in a Lunar Exploration Architecture

Abstract

In January 2005, President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration. This vision involved a progressive expansion of human capabilities beyond Low Earth Orbit. Current design processes utilized to meet this vision employ performance based optimization schemes to determine the ideal solution. In these design processes the important aspects such as cost and reliability are currently calculated as an afterthought to the traditional performance metrics. The methodology implemented in this paper focuses on bringing these decisive variables to the forefront of the design process. To achieve this focus on cost and reliability in a lunar architecture design, a resource allocation technique from the business world will be implemented. This allocation technique optimally distributes the company's resources even though the actual performances of the products are uncertain. This method of resource allocation will be applied to a lunar architecture design to achieve the highest architecture reliability for a given budget. Once the methodology is created it will be implemented in a lunar architecture design tool. This tool will allow the decision maker to independently address the sensitivities of the lunar architecture's reliability to the overall budget of the program.