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The focus of this paper is on reliability and availability design goals. It aims to provide top‐level estimates of the safety and maintainability of future spacecraft systems.

The developed design tool uses basic reliability principles to estimate the probability of a safe mission and the need for repairs/replacement during ground processing, before launch and start of mission, based on the characteristics of the vehicle's main systems: the number of subsystems, the mean time to repair, and the per subsystem average reliability.

A simple reliability, maintainability and safety model is developed to support the top‐level design process of future space transportation vehicles. It also describes how the developed design tool uses various sensitivity analysis functions to improve design decisions.

The goal of the developed tool is to provide engineers/vehicle developers during the early stages of design with a tool that demonstrates the effect on maintainability of improving component reliability and reducing the number of components.

Examines the product design and manufacturing literature to understand why consumer products of daily use often fail to provide the intended function to users’ satisfaction. The review shows that the bulk of published literature addressing functionality and functional representation deals with mechanical systems design, and there are issues that directly affect the consumer that are yet to be accommodated in current research in functional representation. The literature also reveals that very few of the product design support systems have been tested on real design cases, or have been developed and tested using real designers in manufacturing environments – this issue needs serious consideration if efficient designer aids are to be developed in the future. Also, there is relatively little that has been done to develop tools to evaluate alternative design solutions. It is also apparent from this review that the main research focus has been on providing function, rather than on ensuring function in a product that is eventually manufactured.

In the increasingly competitive global economy, survival of an industry depends on catering to customer needs by quickly producing quality products and providing quality service at an affordable price. In production, or in service, ergonomic considerations have manifested themselves in two distinct, yet related, domains. Focuses on the humans who contribute to product manufacture/service. It is frequently advocated that since humans are unreliable and less consistent, compared to machines, they are primarily responsible for lowering product and service quality. Ergonomic considerations, which, ironically, can improve human performance, are paid lip service during manufacturing system design. Compounding the problem is the current inability of most ergonomists to make ergonomic recommendations that do not run counter to the productivity and quality goals of system designers. Addresses these two issues by illustrating, through four case studies, the relationship between quality and variables that affect human performance.