ReFEx: Reusability Flight Experiment - Flight Safety Analysis

Kurzfassung

The German Aerospace Center project ReFEx aims to demonstrate autonomous GNC capabilities for aerodynamically controlled RLVs, its launch is scheduled for 2024 in Australia. This paper covers the flight safety analysis required by the Australian Space Agency (ASA). Monte Carlo campaigns results are used to assert that the flight termination system is capable of destabilizing the vehicle, to define impact probabilities for different ground areas, which are then use to calculate the risk of human injury for off-nominal trajectories of the reentry segment. The results show that the requirements of the ASA are fulfilled with margin.