Reliability Engineering – Key for Designing and Building Safe, Successful, and Affordable Space Systems

In today's space environment, aerospace system designers are seeking more innovative and efficient ways to build safer and more affordable space systems while maintaining an acceptable level of mission success. Reliability engineering is one area with the potential to help design and build space systems with improved safety, affordability, and mission success. This paper discusses reliability engineering as a design discipline, shows the relationship between reliability engineering and other disciplines, and presents case studies and lessons learned from NASA Programs that support and emphasize the fact that reliability engineering is key to designing and building safe, successful, and affordable future space systems.