Medical Resource Set Bulky Item Trade Space Analysis for Spaceflight Medical Risk
The NASA engineering community utilizes event-driven and fault-tree probabilistic techniques to classify risks in the space environment by taking advantage of the inherent knowledge of complex spaceflight system design and testing to quantify failure risk. In harmonizing the risk of human space flight, answering the question of ‘How do we balance health, performance and resource risks with other engineering risks on long duration space missions?’ remains a deeply challenging and largely qualitative practice. The Medical Extensible Dynamic Probabilistic Risk Assessment Tool (MEDPRAT) is one aspect of the efforts by NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP) to quantitatively assess the impact of health and performance risk. One of MEDPRAT’s key features is its high degree of computational efficiency. Coupled with the HRP High Performance Compute cluster located at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, MEDPRAT runs millions of simulated missions in a matter of minutes. This degree of computational efficiency provides the novel opportunity to explore the relationship between medical set mass, volume, and medical resource size. Of particular interest for future human spaceflight missions are ‘bulky’ items, medical resources like devices, which occupy a large portion of the small, allocated mass and volume for the medical set leaving less room for other resources. This talk will present results showing the quantitative impact of forced inclusion of several bulky items across a variety of medical kit constraints, and the effect that a potential research investment into reducing the bulky item mass and volume may have on risk.