A new guidance and flight control system for the DELTA 2 launch vehicle

Because redundancy potentially offers significant improvements in the probability for launch success, it has been one of the most sought after capabilities for launch vehicles. Avionic designs offering this capability have, to date, been largely prohibited due to cost, weight and development schedules. The Redundant Inertial Flight Control Assembly (RIFCA) is a system which offers a practical implementation of fault tolerant avionics through redundancy. The RIFCA program is completing the development phase and will lead to the production of flight hardware, which will start flying on the DELTA 2 in late 1994. This paper presents the redundancy concepts used in both the RIFCA and the vehicle, describes the RIFCA hardware and its integration with the software to provide a fail-op capability within the framework of a cost effective, weight effective system design.