Predicting Failures and Measuring Remaining Equipment Life on Highly Reliable Aerospace Equipment: The Prognostic Analysis' Completed on Boeing and Orbital Spacecraft

by Len Losik

Describes the author's experience as Boeing's Global Positioning System (GPS) Space and Ground Segment Manager responsible for getting the U.S. air Force GPS program funded by the department of Defense competing against 2 other space systems fully operational and funded by the U.S. Navy by developing and using predicting analytics to identify the presence of non-repeatable transient events in normal and abnormal appearing engineering data from electrical and electro-mechanical equipment such as the rubidium and cesium frequency standards on the 12 on-orbit Boeing/U.S. Air Force GPS Block I satellites and on NASA's low earth orbiting satellite known as the Extreme Ultra-Violet Explorer (EUVE) that re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and burned in and landed in Egypt in 2002, a sister ship to the NASA Hubble space telescope. Now called prognostics and health management or PHM technology, the author independently developed predictive algorithms for use with extremely corrupted data from orbiting satellites and launch vehicles during ascent using the Air Force's ground based satellite control resources to win funding for the GPS program by the Department of Defense. PHM was first used by the author to predict on-board satellite atomic frequency standard failures for replacement on the initial GPS constellation of MEO satellites that were operating in a 12,000 mile/12 hour Earth orbit for achieving the highest GPS system wide performance during multi-military service testing and DoD missions. The author used the 12 Boeing Block 1 GPS satellites to win funding from the department of defense resulting in two follow-on contracts for Boeing for 40 additional GPS satellites. With the GPS program funded by the DoD, the two existing, Navy satellite-based navigation and timing programs called TIMATION and TRANSIT were retired. The author includes his results from his 26-year research program on the U.S. air Force's GPS program and NASA/U.C. Berkeley Space Science Laboratory's EUVE program to identify the source and reliability of the non repeatable transient events (NRTE) to predict with 100% certainty, satellite subsystem and launch vehicle avionics equipment failures so that the equipment would be replaced prior to launch. This book documents the author's 26 year research program on both the 12 Boeing/Air Force's GPS satellites and NASA's satellite proving that PHM technology could stop premature subsystem equipment failures that plague the space and defense industry's highly reliable systems that rely on probability analysis to quantify equipment reliability. PHM has been adapted by the author to predict terrorists at airports, astronauts that will become mentally ill on future deep space missions and catastrophic failures of rockets taking tourists to space and premature product failures in any industry that uses probability analysis to produce either hardware or software products reducing returns to below 1% as described in the book.

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 28, 2016