Integrating Air Traffic Management and Space Traffic Management: Concepts, Challenges, and Solutions for the Evolving Aerospace Landscape in Europe

Abstract

For decades, the airspace volume above today’s commercial traffic at altitudes higher than 60,000 ft - referred to as Higher Airspace (HA) in Europe, Upper Class E in the U.S. or sometimes Near Space - had been largely reserved for specialized military operations, experimental flights, rare exploration missions, and only occasionally interrupted by rocket launches. However, advancements in aerospace technology, a growing demand for expanded air travel, novel airborne capabilities, and a surge of (commercial) rockets launched to sub-orbital and orbital destinations, let to identifying the need to develop concepts for a more closely interfacing and later-on integration between Air Traffic Management (ATM) and Space Traffic Management (STM). Reasons for this are manifold, but they all can be summed up to the fact that methods developed have been done so in different contexts and different times: Procedures to allow crossing of airspace to reach higher altitudes have long lead times that leave little flexibility to adjust launch times to weather conditions or other unforeseen events. Covering against risk from unscheduled failures often requires closing large regions of air space, which does not scale with the number of launches expected over the coming decades. Additionally, every-now-and-then occurring reentries of large objects together with the inherent uncertainties of their predictions lead to closures of airspace that are questionable when considering the probability of casualty causing events, yet understandable when looking at the risk of being responsible if something occurs, without clear procedures and risk description. As an example, the brief closure of Spanish airspace in November 2022 in reaction to a reentering Chinese launcher stage, lead to the delay of more than 300 commercial flights.