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A high degree of in-flight availability of an Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) must be assured to allow Extravehicular Activity (EVA) to become a routine operation, to minimize life cycle costs, and to support long duration missions. The ability to maintain an Advanced EMU and other equipment in flight will be of primary importance in achieving these high availability requirements while minimizing onboard spares quantities and resupply costs. This paper presents an analytical assessment of the advantages of in-flight maintainability in providing continued EMU availability for space-based operations by use of modular assemblies and components.

Applied research and technology development (R&TD) is often characterized by uncertainty, risk, and significant delays before tangible returns are obtained. Given the increased awareness of limitations in resources, effective R&TD today needs a method for up-front assessment of competing technologies to help guide technology investment decisions. Such an assessment approach must account for uncertainties in system performance parameters, mission requirements and architectures, and internal and external events influencing a development program. The methodology known as decision analysis has the potential to address these issues. It was evaluated by performing a case study assessment of alternative carbon dioxide removal technologies for NASA's proposed First Lunar Outpost program. An approach was developed that accounts for the uncertainties in each technology's cost and performance parameters as well as programmatic uncertainties such as mission architecture.

The Electronic Cuff Checklist (ECC) is an electronic device to be strapped to the wrist of a space suit. The ECC consists of an electroluminescent flat panel display, control and data storage electronics, an RS232 serial data port and a battery. The device is an electronic replacement for the cuff checklist used during the Apollo, Skylab and Shuttle Extravehicular Activities (EVA's). The original cuff checklist consists of up to 25 double sided 7.6 by 17.7 cm (3 inch by 5 inch) pages held open with a spring and mounted on the astronaut's wrist with a device similar to an expandable watch band. The principal advantages of the electronic device are: 1) it can store a larger amount of information than the manual checklist, up to 2000 pages of information with 1 megabyte of memory; and 2) the ECC can be reloaded with new information from an RS232 port on the ground before a shuttle launch or while on orbit such as for Space Station Freedom (SSF) applications.