RSTT applications for Commercial Space Flight highlighted at International Astronautical Congress

Aerospace Concepts’ Flight Safety Analysis Program lead, Michael Brett, today delivered a paper at the 62nd International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. The paper, entitled Risk Hazard Analysis for Commercial Spaceflight Activities using Range Safety Template Toolkit, focuses on how RSTT could be used to address the user needs of commercial space flight operators.

Commercial space flight is a rapidly emerging industry which is leading the development of unique and innovative methods of accessing space for the purposes of tourism, supporting research activities, rapid global transportation, satellite launch, space station resupply and debris mitigation. Operators such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and XCOR Aerospace are all entering the market with unique mission concepts and safety requirements. With these rapid changes and advancements in spaceflight concepts, regulatory systems and range managers face challenges in adapting their policies and procedures to ensure the safety of the general public, mission personnel and range infrastructure.

The Range Safety Template Toolkit (RSTT) capability offers rapid generation of mission-specific templates which can be combined with geospatial information, such as asset locations and population densities, to provide casualty and damage estimates for mission operational planning and safety analysis. The toolkit has been applied to a wide range of space missions, including the HIFiRE hypersonics research program and the atmospheric re-entry of the Japanese Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission.

“Each new vehicle we’ve analysed in RSTT has extended and improved the capabilities of the system” explained Michael Brett, “with the broad range of vehicles analysed to date, we’ve found that we have almost all of the elements necessary to conduct rigorous safety analysis on the most complex of Commercial Space Flight missions”.

Aerospace Concepts now intends to conduct a small pilot study from publically available data of an upcoming commercial mission to further test its systems and provide an indication of the level of effort required to support commercial spaceflight.

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Shoal (formerly Aerospace Concepts) is complex systems design company. We use Systems Engineering combined with Modelling, Simulation and Analysis to help our clients define, analyse, decide, optimise, and deliver technology-intensive projects in complex environments across Defence, Space, Transport, Energy and Infrastructure.

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Cape Town, South Africa, 4 October 2011