COSMO: Risks analysis of the launch vehicle crashes and spacecraft failures

Motivation

Aerospace industry has become one of the important and dynamically developed sectors of the world economy in the last decades. It brings in billions of US dollars due to commercialization of space projects, especially by provisioning telecommunications services, Earth observation and navigation, weather monitoring, etc. Space projects belong to so-called mission critical applications, i.e. applications, whose failures cause both material and pecuniary losses (and sometimes, unfortunately, loss of human lives) and also can ruin long-term scientific, military and other important government or commercial programs. Besides, high reliability and safety of rocket-space systems are of an increasing economic importance, since the disasters and space accidents lead not only to missing profits, but also to millions of dollars loss.

Project concept and architecture

The purpose of the work is to analyse the risks of the launch vehicle crashes and spacecraft failures, which occurred during the first two decades of the 21st century. We analyse orbital carrier rockets and spacecrafts launch statistics and investigate the causes of launch vehicle crashes and spacecraft failures and also analyse faults in different subsystems which led to the accidents, focusing mainly on the influence of computer-based control systems, their hardware and software components on reliability and safety of rocket-space systems.

The project structure:

1. Development of a database of orbital carrier rockets and spacecrafts incidents, crashes and failures;
2. Evaluating probability of orbital carrier rockets and spacecrafts crashes and failures and analysing failure modes, criticality and effect (FME(C)A);
3. Analysing influence of computer-based control systems, their hardware and software components on reliability and safety of rocket-space systems.

Database of orbital carrier rockets and spacecrafts incidents, crashes and failures will accumulate information about the space incidents and failures from a broad range of public information sources, e.g. journal publication, conference presentations, newspaper accounts, information agencies reports, thematic Web sites, forums and weblogs.

Failure modes and effect analysis FME(C)A will analyse the most common failures of orbital carrier rockets and spacecrafts and their root cases and evaluate failure risks, probability, and criticality.

Analysis of influence of computer-based control systems will report the most common cases of HW/SW faults and will report probability of failures and crashes caused by hardware and software.

Findings so far

Our previously reported results showed that:

• annual average spacecraft failure probability varies in the range [0.074..0.183]
• average spacecraft failure probability is equal to 0.15, that is twice as much as launch failure probability
• 9.34% of spacecrafts failed to reach or to deploy in orbit! This takes 77.3 (!) percent of the total number of spacecraft's loses
• faults of control system software caused 13% of the total number of launch failures (resulting in 15% of fatal launch failures)
• software faults resulted in fatal or partial launch failure in 1-out-of-110 launches on average
• 20% of spacecraft failures were caused by software faults that leaded to fatal consequences only in 6%
• 5.8% of spacecraft failures were caused by hardware malfunction that leaded to fatal consequences in 6%

Target audience

1. Satellite insurance providers.
2. Developers of launch vehicles and spacecrafts and their computer-based control systems.
3. Governments and national bodies.

Sources of revenue

Paid subscription to a web site and newsletters.

Implementation stage

The research group has developed a database of orbital carrier rockets and spacecrafts crashes and failures and monitor all related incidents.

Previous results were reported in:

1. Tarasyuk, O., Gorbenko, A., Kharchenko, V., and Zasukha, S. (2012) ‘A Study of Orbital Carrier Rocket and Spacecraft Failures: 2000-2009’, Information and Security : An International Journal. Procon Ltd., 28(2), pp. 179–198. DOI: 10.11610/isij.2815.