Safety in Launch Operations

This chapter provides a guideline for managing third party risks generated by the launch of a space booster. First it defines the hazardous conditions necessary for risk to be present, exposure of people or assets to the hazards, and the vulnerability of people or assets to the hazardous conditions. This provides the structure for how to control risks. Commonly used risk measures are defined. The discussion then turns to the implementation of risk and hazard controls including defining exclusion regions based on prelaunch analyses to protect populations and defining real-time range safety systems for limiting the risk during an operation. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the flight safety analysis process with an emphasis on debris risk analysis, and includes both highly simplified models for rapid risk estimation and more sophisticated models.