Corrosion Prevention and Control for Electrical Products of Reusable Launch Vehicles: A Life-Cycle Framework Spanning Design, Manufacturing, Testing, Operation, and Maintenance

Electrical products of reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) face corrosion problems that expendable rockets never encounter: sea/land recovery introduces salt-fog and damp-heat exposure; repeated flights bring thermal-cycling-driven “breathing” condensation; and the “recover–refurbish–refly” mode makes corrosion damage accumulate across missions. Current standards (e.g., the salt-fog/damp-heat tests of GJB 150 and MIL-STD-810) target single-stress qualification of expendable products and lack reuse-oriented cumulative-damage criteria. This paper proposes a life-cycle corrosion prevention and control system for RLV electrical products covering five phases—design, manufacturing, testing, operation, and maintenance—including exposure-class-driven finish/coating/sealing selection, ionic-contamination control, combined-stress testing, post-recovery desalting, corrosion-specific inspection, and SCC screening of metallic housings and fasteners. A mechanism-specific state-model framework is then introduced: each corrosion mechanism is assigned its own drivers and inspectable state variable, state limits are converted to normalized life-consumption fractions, and failure/limit life is distinguished from operationally allowable life. Connector fretting corrosion is modeled with an environmental acceleration factor that preserves mechanical wear in dry enclosures. A flight-heritage data-acquisition board is used only as a case-study application, not as flight validation of corrosion behavior. The illustrative calculation shows how contact-resistance data, vibration-derived cycle counts, and operational thresholds can be linked, while Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation demonstrates the sensitivity of absolute life estimates and precludes a definitive mechanism ranking. The main contribution is therefore a reproducible method and calibration pathway for incorporating corrosion into RLV reuse decisions; product-specific test and inspection data remain necessary for validated life predictions.