A Guide for the Design of Highly Reusable Space Transportation was developed to provide designers and decision makers a means for focusing key factors and relationships so that the resulting product is highly reusable, very responsive, safe, dependable, operable, reasonable in acquisition costs, and definitely affordable. The intent is to aid in strategic decision making. The guide deals with the many variables that go into providing an affordable, highly reusable Space Transportation System and brings an order of priority for improvement to each along with a descriptive understanding of each factor. These factors are called design and program features and benchmarks are provided where possible from existing systems. The desirable features have been developed from a combination of lessons learned in Shuttle, a bench marking approach, previous studies, a rigorous top-down methodology, and the experience and insights of team members. The consideration of these actual design features is important in broad architectural studies to produce operability and acceptable recurring costs when operating a reusable space transportation system.
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Edgar Zapata, NASA Kennedy Space Center
Shuttle Process Engineering Directorate, Fluid Systems Division