Litigating MarginFrom Rapid Deployment to Long-Term Reliability

The question

Radiation requirements carry margin. Some of that margin covers an identifiable uncertainty in the environment, the transport calculation, or the device response. Some of it has accumulated through standards, project policy, and inherited practice without a clear connection to mission risk. The two kinds are generally indistinguishable in a requirements document, and the cost of carrying both is paid in parts selection, test campaigns, schedule, and the exclusion of hardware that would have performed.

Programs that deploy on short cadence make early radiation decisions with limited evidence and limited time. Programs that qualify for long duration carry methods that have been refined over decades and could, in places, be streamlined without changing the acceptance decision. This workshop brings the two together, with the government agencies, prime contractors, defense industrial base suppliers, and research institutions that sit between them, to examine requirement by requirement what margin is buying us and what evidence would justify reducing it.

The intended output is not consensus. Each session is expected to produce a proposed decision rule, the conditions under which it would fail, and a statement of the data still needed to support it. Those statements of missing data are the foundation for proposals to close the gaps.