Facilitating Sustainable Commercial Space Transportation Through an Efficient Integration into Air Traffic Management

Abstract

Abstract

The emerging market of Commercial Space Transportation (CST) is not only developing efficient and cost-effective access to space but also fostering new concepts of passenger transportation. As an effect, an increase of spaceflights and suborbital launches can already be observed over the past years and further growth is expected. The same applies to the number of spaceports for launch and landing operations of space vehicles (SVs) worldwide. That said, SVs will more frequently pass through civil airspace and will evolve from rare special events to regular airspace users. The need for a safe and efficient integration of SV operations into the air traffic system is evident. Considering concepts of very high-speed intercontinental passenger transport via suborbital point-to-point flights, this integration issue is becoming even more relevant. Air Traffic Management (ATM) is playing a key role in the effort to ensure a sustainable CST system. The ATM integration concept has to follow a common approach that can accommodate all different types of commercial SV operations. It must be flexible and resilient enough to handle the uncertainties of launch and reentry events, and it has to provide measures to cope with a target level of safety for spaceflights which is still significantly lower compared to commercial airplanes. It has to be the goal to integrate all operations into one system to ensure a seamless and efficient approach. This article describes the necessary evolvement from the current state of the art of integrating spaceflight into ATM to a concept that facilitates the requirements of trajectory-based operations under the regimes of future Single European Sky and the U.S. Next Generation Air Transportation System. It shows how dedicated CST services for the System Wide Information Management can facilitate an interoperable ATM integration. To study the effects of SV operations on air traffic and to evaluate mitigation strategies and optimized ATM integration, a case study design, based on a point-to-point suborbital intercontinental passenger transport concept, will be presented.