Range Safety Assessment Tool (RSAT): An analysis environment for safety assessment of launch and reentry vehicles

Abstract

The expected diversity in the kinds of vehicles that are currently appearing in the commercial space transportation sector raises questions about the possibility of improvements to current methodologies for licensing launch and reentry operations in use by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). These licensing procedures are designed to limit risks to public health and safety to acceptable levels and have served us well until now. Concerns may arise because the majority of methods in use are derived from expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) and the space shuttle era, and the possibility exists that they may be overly conservative. To investigate the extent to which the current methodology may be improved, an open source analysis environment for assessing the safety of the uninvolved public on the ground has been developed. The safety analysis environment is called Range Safety Assessment Tool (RSAT), it can be used for launch and reentry operations and, in principle, can be applied for all kinds of vehicle configurations that may be proposed. RSAT uses random sampling techniques to calculate statistics of interest associated with ground risks due to vehicle malfunctions. The risks being modeled include inert and explosive debris effects, debris toxic gas dispersion, and blast overpressure due to vehicle explosions. Special consideration is given to quantifying the risk to the uninformed public by computing the appropriate safety metrics, which in this case is the value of the expected casualty per mission (ETC). As part of this analysis environment, a 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) trajectory optimization tool that uses a pseudospectral collocation method has been developed and is used to establish nominal trajectories for a number of different kinds of missions. In this paper, we present RSAT’s major components and characteristics, and its predictive capabilities to analyze realistic launch and reentry accident scenarios. The output of the environment is verified and validated with existing data and previous calculations done with existing tools.

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