Applying Health Management Technology to the NASA Exploration System-of-Systems

*† ‡ Human-rated space flight systems are characterized by intense concerns for flight crew safety and for high costs of operations and development. Non-human-rated space flight systems associated with cargo or scientific/robotic payloads are only slightly different. They are characterized by concerns for reliability and performance as well as for high costs of operations and development. In the past, across the aerospace spectrum, significant efforts have been expended to try and influence the factors that contribute to level of safety, level of reliability, and cost of operations/development; but because these concerns often seem to be at odds, the manner in which the influencing efforts are applied is a tricky business. In the new NASA Exploration system-of-systems environment, where human and robotic elements must interact as part of a synergistic and interoperable whole, the necessity for these influencing efforts to move forward in as expedient, efficient, and integrated manner as possible, becomes an overall guiding principle. In this regard, Health Management (HM) technology has been touted as an approach that holds considerable promise as a method of simultaneously influencing these concerns in the proper directions. HM techniques have been around for a long time under various names and guises, and have broad applicability within the aerospace arena. However, in the area of human spaceflight, experience is limited to the early Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, the ongoing Space Shuttle/International Space Station (ISS) programs, and a handful of experimental/research & development programs, most notably the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program. Nevertheless, a substantial amount of knowledge, experience, and lessons-learned from these programs, along with some information carefully extracted from the large repertoire of unmanned space and nonspace programs, can be applied to Project Constellation in the new NASA Exploration environment.