Regulatory Development Study: Launch System Response Modes

The UK Space Agency wished to understand the ways in which a launch vehicle might perform in a successful flight, the failures that could lead to an unsuccessful flight and how the vehicle might respond to this failure. 

In response UKLSL aimed to provide an overview of reasonably foreseeable launch vehicle failure and response modes to aid in the modelling of an example case from the UK.  

In order to achieve this, they reviewed historic launch failures from the past 30 years, grouping like failures into “Failure Modes. Similarly, vehicle responses to failure were grouped and categorised. Thus, enabling UKLSL to identify the most common failure modes and responses. 

Engineering and mathematical methodologies used to link vehicle response modes to vehicle failure modes were scrutinised and presented to demonstrate how they might be used to understand the potential failures/response modes for a specific launch vehicle design. When used with the historical failure mode data, these methodologies could be used to quantify the likelihood of different failures in a launch.