When formulating the design information of space system concepts, space architects need to be aware of the consequences and implications of the design decisions they make, as there are many ways space systems can fail—small defects can lead to catastrophic consequences, and the remoteness of the sites would impose prohibitive costs to fix issues in the fortunate cases where issues are discovered. To learn from mistakes, this paper leverages cases of system failures in construction and spaceflight projects due to built-in defects—or embedded pathogens. Depicting the sequence of defective processes traveling across system hierarchy and project timeline, the case studies illustrate that each failure case is plagued with multiple paths of latent failures—pathogen threads—propagating and reaching the artifact. By extracting the design decisions that directly or indirectly contributed to the system failures, this paper discusses the effects of physical and organizational strains. These strains, both intentional and unintentional, undermine the safety, quality, and integrity of the system if handled inadequately. They are induced by design solutions exacerbated by underlying organizational factors that cause the design-induced strains to end up as embedded pathogens. We show how defective design decisions as well as inadequately managed design solutions can be incubated into system failures. This paper concludes by underscoring the importance of communicating and managing design-induced strains throughout the project lifecycle to prevent them from causing system failures in space system development, deployment, and operation.
Igarashi et al. (2024) studied this question.