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Graduate Student Seminar by Dean Bucher & David Reeves |
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Date: January 27, 2005
Time: 10:30am
Location: NIA, Rm 404
Speaker: Dean Bucher and David Reeves with Georgia Tech
Subject: "Qualitative Robust Systems Engineering Analysis of Apollo Concepts and Architectures"
With the new exploration vision set forth by President Bush, NASA is undertaking the largest project the agency has seen since the development of the original Apollo campaign; however, much has changed in the past forty years. Due to the failures of the early 1990\'s Mars missions and the recent tragedy of the SST Columbia, NASA has begun a period of reorganization emphasizing safety, affordability, and sustainability in its design processes. In addition, the importance of public opinion is more influential than ever, increasing the significance of the credibility and science foundation inherent in future missions. Over the past few decades, powerful advancements have been made in the field of Systems Engineering and Design. In order to ensure the success of future missions, NASA has begun the process of merging Systems Engineering with Quality Engineering Methods and integrating them into the agency\'s unified operational and functional architectures.
In an effort to aid in the design of future manned missions to the Moon and beyond, this paper will demonstrate a conceptual analysis of the original Apollo systems. Using a qualitative robust design approach developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology, mission systems will be broken down into their level 0 requirements and then reconstructed to provide a comprehensive understanding of their fundamental architectures. By slowing down the beginning of the design process, more knowledge is gained while retaining greater design freedom. With the use of tools such as quality function deployment diagraphs and morphological matrices, feasible alternatives will be generated and evaluated against a baseline of the original Apollo systems. In developing a QFD, the seven management and planning tools, now common in industry, will be used to perform a full requirements analysis, including organizational difficulty and technical risk relationships between requirements. After the requirements are fully identified, operational and functional architectures will be constructed to illustrate the interrelations between systems. With this added understanding and the use of a morphological matrix, viable alternatives will be identified while others will be shown to be unfeasible. Finally, these alternatives will be evaluated using a Pugh matrix and a TOPSIS evaluation in which key factors of each mission scenario will be qualitatively compared to the original Apollo baseline, resulting in the final selection of the most ideal mission concept.
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