Health scorecard of spacecraft platforms: Track record of on-orbit anomalies and failures and preliminary comparative analysis

Abstract

Choosing the “right” satellite platform for a given market and mission requirements is a major investment decision for a satellite operator. With a variety of platforms available on the market from different manufacturers, and multiple offerings from the same manufacturer, the down-selection process can be quite involved. In addition, because data for on-obit failures and anomalies per platform is unavailable, incomplete, or fragmented, it is difficult to compare options and make an informed choice with respect to the critical attribute of field reliability of different platforms. In this work, we first survey a large number of geosynchronous satellite platforms by the major satellite manufacturers, and we provide a brief overview of their technical characteristics, timeline of introduction, and number of units launched. We then analyze an extensive database of satellite failures and anomalies, and develop for each platform a “health scorecard” that includes all the minor and major anomalies, and complete failures—that is failure events of different severities—observed on-orbit for each platform. We identify the subsystems that drive these failure events and how much each subsystem contributes to these events for each platform. In addition, we provide the percentage of units in each platform which have experienced failure events, and, after calculating the total number of years logged on-orbit by each platform, we compute its corresponding average failure and anomaly rate. We conclude this work with a preliminary comparative analysis of the health scorecards of different platforms. The concept of a “health scorecard” here introduced provides a useful snapshot of the failure and anomaly track record of a spacecraft platform on orbit. As such, it constitutes a useful and transparent benchmark that can be used by satellite operators to inform their acquisition choices (“inform” not “base” as other considerations are factored in when comparing different spacecraft platforms), and by satellite manufacturers to guide their testing and reliability improvement programs. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that these health scorecards should be considered dynamic documents to be updated on a regular basis if they are to remain accurate and relevant for comparative analysis purposes, as new information will impact their content.