4th IAASS workshop on space launch and re-entry safety

Shaun Wilson, CEO of Aerospace Concepts, recently participated in the 4th IAASS workshop on public safety of launch and re-entry operations held at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague Island, VA.

The International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), was established 16 April 2004 in the Netherlands, as a non-profit organisation dedicated to furthering international cooperation and scientific advancement in the field of space systems safety.

The IAAS workshops are a venue for space safety professionals from the major agencies and their supporting contractors to discuss standards, techniques and challenges in analysing and determining what appropriately safe conditions for space activity. This fourth workshop in the series continued this mission; comparing tools and techniques for case studies in launch and re-entry and focus on other specific issues such as estimating fragmentation.

Aerospace Concepts’ participation is a means of contributing to the development of the profession and benchmarking our corporate capabilities against World’s best practice. The company presented three working papers to the conference developed through our Flight Safety Analysis (FSA) Program and the application of the Range Safety Template Toolkit (RSTT) suite of software:

• Creation of Debris Catalogs Using Fractal Fragmentation,
• Determining Appropriate Failure Response Mode Probabilities for High-Altitude Sounding Rockets, and
• The Australian Approach to Ground Population Modelling and Risk Assessment.

These papers were well received and they added to the IAASS body of knowledge as well as improving our profile in this niche community. The papers also serve the purpose of documenting how we undertake three key aspects of the RSTT process thus strengthening how we work.

The workshop also highlighted the niche capabilities which Aerospace Concepts has in the safety analysis market through rigorous modelling and ‘assumption lite’ massive Monte Carlo simulation, and our very unique fractal fragmentation method of estimating fragmentation.

The next IAASS Working, being the 5^th workshop will be held in conjunction with the 6^th IAASS Conference in Montreal, Canada in May 2013.