Abstract
Designers seldom, if ever, create designs “out of whole cloth”. They might begin with a clean piece of paper but their designs, no matter how creative or pioneering, must always embrace the technological heritage within which they are imbedded, at least to a degree. If they fail to do so they will almost certainly have great difficulty in being implemented, and even greater difficulty being successful. In this way the words “heritage” and “risk” have been linked, since time immemorial, in the design process and therefore in the designer’s mind’s eye. While this linkage is, in this sense, nothing new, the linkage has until recently been done heuristically and informally based upon the judgment and expertise of the individual designer, perhaps supplemented by the judgment and expertise of those peers of personal acquaintance.
Recently, as an outgrowth of the broader application of probabilistic technology, a more formal and systematic link between design heritage and design risk has been attempted. While the number of actual applications are few, those that have been attempted seem to forecast that significant benefits might accrue from further development of the concept and its wider application especially in the case of the advanced technical designs so characteristic of aerospace systems. While the process of risk-based design is still in development, the individual steps in the process are beginning to evolve.
These steps, which are listed in summary form in Figure 1 below, will be discussed in the presented paper as they apply to the design of a container to return samples from Mars.
Watney Solid +/- Void
