An Approach for Calculating the Cost of Launch Vehicle Reliability

The goal of this paper is to determine the cost of increasing launch vehicle reliability during conceptual design. The launch vehicle mission requirements are held constant while various reliability strategies are evaluated for their affects on different performance and cost metrics. Traditional design disciplines, such as trajectory analysis and propulsion are included within the performance analysis while the cost discipline focuses on launch vehicle development and production cost. The reliability modeling is developed specifically for application to launch vehicles. A design environment is created that integrates the performance, cost, and reliability disciplines for use with optimization. The integrated environment is utilized to determine a set of optimal design configurations based on a specific weighting of cost and reliability. Different design options for the Cargo Launch Vehicle from the Exploration System Architecture Study are considered and the final result is a set of configurations optimized for a particular weighting of cost and reliability.