NEW SATELLITE TESTING STRATEGY FOR COMMERCIAL PROGRAMS

The commercial space industry is required by current and future progra ms to be always more competitive in terms of cost and schedule. In thi s context it is mandatory to establish suitable testing approaches tha t can be a reasonable compromise among the conflicting needs of cost/s chedule reduction, technical risk and test effectiveness. The particip ation of Alenia Spazio in the Globalstar program, having the responsib ility of integrating and testing one qualification model and 56 flight models satellites in less than 2 years, with a production rate of fou r satellites per month, gave the opportunity to investigate suitable t est strategies that can achieve such a goal. This paper will describe the various aspects analyzed by Alenia Spazio to identify some aspects and areas related to testing strategy for medium/small size class sat ellites. The first part of the paper will examine the importance of th e ''Concurrent Engineering'' approach-in place of traditional project environment-aiming to involve test engineers in the satellite project cycle, besides design engineers, from the early program phase. Then th e model philosophy and derived test programs will be discussed, outlin ing the difference between the ''design verification oriented'' test a pproach, for satellite qualification purposes and the ''workmanship ch eck oriented'' test sequence conceived only for recurring flight model s. Further discussions will deal with the ''island production'' approa ch applicable when a high production rate of satellites is required to deploy in orbit a constellation of small/medium size spacecrafts in s hort time. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese rved.