Abstract
Abstract
Commercial spaceport activities have been under study for more than a dozen years by governments and industry. For clarity in this article, the terms spaceport and launch site are interchangeable. Although the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issues a license for a launch site that covers safety of the launch operation, other safety activities such as 14 CFR Section 420.53 Control of public access, Section 420.59 Part c, Launch site accident investigation response plan, Section 420.55 Scheduling of launch site operations, and International Traffic in Arms Regulations Requirements and International Coordination Among Spaceports are left to the spaceport to manage. This study culminated a collection of publicly available policies, regulations, and procedures pertaining to commercial launch operations (which may be conducted at a joint air and spaceport). It is also a collection of other publicly published information from nongovernment sources. Principle Investigator Hynes and the author assembled a working group of colleagues and New Mexico State University (NMSU) graduate students who developed a listing of commercial spaceport activities and a taxonomy to structure that information. The PI interviewed all spaceport executives and the Range Commanders executives before developing the final taxonomy. A draft of this taxonomy was provided to all current spaceport managers and the Range Commanders Council, which consists of Army, Navy, Air Force, and NASA representatives, for review and comment to refine and improve the categorization. Once the taxonomy was finalized and named the Framework for Spaceport Operations, the working group began the collection of documents that could be used by commercial spaceports to establish their own procedures, standards and regulations. When there were limited number of documents available, appropriate aviation documents and standards were included as an aid. In order for the thousands of pages of documents to be searchable online by users, and to enable constant additions to the framework, and to assure the collection of websites remains active, the NMSU Library was selected to create a searchable digital collection. The working group collaborated with the digital librarians at NMSU Library to organize the documents within a content management system. The body of knowledge (BoK) for spaceport practices, accessible on the web through the NMSU Library Digital Collections (http://contentdm.nmsu.edu) by the public, is a tool to increase spaceport safety and reduce the duplication of implementing spaceport operational activities. The BoK is organized according to the framework, which has 12 categories (major areas) and >125 subcategories to enable a better understanding of the activities and responsibilities of a commercial spaceport. The working group has supplemented this list with appropriate procedures, standards, and regulations for many commercial spaceport activities. In 2015, definitions were created for all subcategories and included in the document management system. In 2016, two additional categories were included based on FAA Accident Threat Categories and Accident Groupings.
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