Cost impact of automated acceptance testing of Electrical Ground Support Equipment for spacecraft testing

In today's environment, building a reliable and cost-effective spacecraft is perhaps emphasized more than ever before. Sponsors are looking for the same high-quality products but at lower costs and with shorter schedules. Whether it is a spacecraft for the Department of Defense (DoD), a research observatory for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), or a commercial communications satellite, total cost is a significant factor. One of the areas where costs can escalate is in the integration and test (I&T) phase of the spacecraft life cycle. The I&T phase begins when the first component or subsystem is ready for integration into the spacecraft structure. As I&T progresses with additional subsystems (and associated test staff for those subsystems), scheduling tests becomes more complex because certain tests depend on other tests or tasks being completed. Because the large test team is on standby, any delays in testing can result in a substantial impact on cost. A way to help mitigate cost overruns is to incorporate automated testing. This paper is a follow-on discussion of a previous paper entitled "Reliability and Efficiency of Electrical Ground Support Equipment through Automation, Modularization, and Standardization" [1]. An enhancement proposed in this previous paper to automate the electrical ground support equipment (EGSE) acceptance testing has now been implemented, and the successes, as well as lessons learned, from this implementation are being presented here. As in the previous paper, the umbilical ground support equipment is the focus of the discussion. The design and implementation to automate the acceptance testing is described. Test durations of the automated and manual test cases are compared. To see the impact on cost of acceptance testing EGSE during the I&T campaign, the results are then extrapolated to include the typical set of EGSE used at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).