• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.199-208
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• 2014

Purpose: This paper explains how to obtain the Bayes estimates of the whole launch vehicle and of a vehicle stage, respectively, for a newly developed expendable launch vehicle. Methods: We determine the parameters of the beta prior distribution using the upper bound of the 60% Clopper-Pearson confidence interval of failure probability which is calculated from previous launch data considering the experience of the developer. Results: Probability that a launch vehicle developed from an inexperienced developer succeeds in the first launch is obtained by about one third, which is much smaller than that estimated from the previous research. Conclusion: The proposed approach provides a more conservative estimate than the previous noninformative prior, which is more reasonable especially for the initial reliability of a new vehicle which is developed by an inexperienced developer.