320. Commercial Spaceflight Risk Assessment and Communication

Team

Project Description

The success of commercial human space flight depends in part on establishing an efficient and reliable approach for appropriately regulating the safety of commercially operated launch vehicles and spacecraft. It is recognized that in order to ensure proper regulations are implemented, all parties must be in agreement on the terminology and definitions used to describe the scenarios. A number of critical terms in the literature have been found to have conflicting definitions, which can result in differing interpretation of regulatory statements, thus complicating enforcement and opening up potential legal challenges. Beyond the analysis and mitigation of risk, the outcome must also be verified and effectively conveyed to commercial passengers
in an understandable manner. This work will provide a systematic framework for the FAA to use going forward, with results to be published for public and industry consideration and discussion.

Project Outcomes

1) a systematic framework for characterizing risk assessment as a function of phase of spaceflight in terms of the range of scenarios from nominal operations to catastrophic failures as described above;
2) an assessment of risk prediction along with suggestions from prior spaceflight and more common terrestrial analogies for effectively communicating the risk of space transportation to the public in a balanced, informing manner;
3) characterization of verification processes aimed at ensuring the defined level of reliability (risk mitigation) is achieved for a given vehicle.

Summary of Output

The success of commercial human space flight depends in part on establishing an efficient and reliable approach for appropriately regulating the safety of commercially operated launch vehicles and spacecraft. It is recognized that in order to ensure proper regulations are implemented, all parties must be in agreement on the terminology and definitions used to describe the scenarios. A number of critical terms in the literature have been found to have conflicting definitions, which can result in differing interpretation of regulatory statements, thus complicating enforcement and opening up potential legal challenges. Beyond the analysis and mitigation of risk, the outcome must also be verified and effectively conveyed to commercial passengers in an understandable manner. This work will provide a systematic framework for the FAA to use going forward, with results to be published for public and industry consideration and discussion.