Duration of an Interrupted Countdown

Technical Report No. 65 (September 27, 1962) from Stanford University’s Applied Mathematics and Statistics Laboratories, by Sidney I. Firstman of Stanford and the RAND Corporation, under project director Gerald J. Lieberman; supported by the Army, Navy, and Air Force under Office of Naval Research contract Nonr-225(53). Models a launch countdown as a stochastic “interrupted service process”: a countdown could be halted by any of several kinds of problems, and after each interruption could resume under one of seven different policies considered in the paper. Derives expressions for the resulting duration distribution, with the first two moments worked out explicitly — an early piece of operations-research literature applying queueing theory to launch-pad procedure rather than vehicle engineering.