Full-Scale Pyroshock Separation Test: Attenuation with Distance

Pyroshock events in space vehicles lead to high-magnitude short-duration structural transient events that can cause malfunction or degradation of electronic components, cracks or fractures in brittle materials, local plastic deformation, or materials to experience accelerated fatigue life. As a result, analysts in the launch vehicle industry commonly define environments creating criteria for component testing or load factor development to ensure that designs are capable of surviving these events. With the conservatism in these environment definitions and the inherent high-magnitude response of the excitation, the need for knockdown factors exists. In the 1960s, Martin Marietta performed testing to develop a set of knockdown factors looking at shock attenuation with distance. With the advancement of data acquisition technology, however, the need to validate their work exists. This work looks at full-scale separation pyroshock test data collected by Orbital ATK during NASA’s Ares I-X program and compares it...