Pushing reliability prediction practices in space applications

Accurate and consistent reliability measures are invaluable for the safe and sustainable design and operation of systems in space applications. To achieve those goals, the current practices in the space community range from probabilistic and heuristic approaches, to best-practice and out-of-field guideline-based approaches. Establishing common ground and offering a go-to handbook for the space community was the goal of the reliability.space project. The resulting reliability.space handbook covers a majority of reliability prediction aspects in space applications. In this paper, the status quo and its deficiencies are summarized, followed by an introduction to the reliability.space handbook and its interactive digital version that aim at addressing all raised deficiencies. A case study finally applies the principles of the reliability.space handbook to the reliability prediction of a megaconstellation of CubeSats.