A study of on-orbit spacecraft failures

Even though spacecraft are carefully designed and tested to meet their mission lifetime, many suffer unrecoverable on-orbit failures very early. Other spacecraft, despite severe failures, are able to exceed their expected lifetime when effective failure recovery procedures are applied. In 2005, a study of on-orbit spacecraft failures was undertaken which resulted in identifying 156 failures occurring from 1980 to 2005 on civil and military spacecraft. These failures were analyzed to compare different spacecraft subsystems and estimate their impact on the mission. Although there is no perfect system that could prevent any failure, the lessons learned from the past years show that adequate testing, redundancy and flexibility are the keys to a reliable spacecraft failure recovery system.