Impact of integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) technologies on ground operations for reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) and spacecraft

Incorporation of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) technologies into launch vehicle and spacecraft designs offers the potential for significant savings in operations costs. IVHM has three basic objectives. First is more autonomous operation in flight and on the ground, which directly translates to reduced workload on the ground controller team through reduction of raw vehicle data into "health summary information." Next is reduced ground processing of reusable vehicles due to more performance of system health checks in flight rather than back on the ground as well as more automated ground servicing and checkout. Lastly is enhanced vehicle safety and reliability due to increased capability to monitor system health using modern sensing systems inside even the harsh environment of an engine combustion chamber as well as through prediction of pending failures. The "integrated" piece of IVHM is the total integration of flight and ground IVHM elements. The three elements of flight IVHM are advanced light weight/low power sensors, extensive real-time data processing and analysis and distributed data acquisition architecture with high-density mass storage. The two elements of ground IVHM are evolved control room architectures with advanced applications and automated ground processing systems. The status of current flight experiments on the Space Shuttle, Deep Space-1, X-33, X-34 and X-37 is presented.