Commercial Space Transportation and Air Traffic Insertion - SESAR Requirements and the European Perspective

Commercial Space Transportation and Air Traffic Insertion - SESAR Requirements and the European Perspective

Jim Henderson Welcome Center, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Daytona Beach

Commercial Space Transportation becomes an international business and requires landing

opportunities all over the world. Hence the integration of space vehicles in other airspace

than the US NAS is an important topic to be considered. The Single European Sky ATM

Research Programme (SESAR) is preparing the implementation of a new ATM system in

Europe. The requirements are defined by the concept of the shared Business Trajectory and

System Wide Information Management (SWIM).

Space vehicle operations are associated with the requested need for submitting an Mishap

Investigation Plan (MIP), containing responding and reporting procedures referring to

possible reentry or launch incidents or accidents. This leads to the submission of an

Emergency Response Plan (ERP), addressing information procedures about a planned

Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) mission of the airspace alerting and emergency services in

the areas of:

 Emergency Detection

o Information relay between the Commercial Space Transportation (CST )

vehicle operator and the Traffic Flow Management (TFM )

 Response Organization

o Due to the fact that orbital CST missions may need to be aborted anywhere

around the earth, a global alerting function has to include segregated foci of

the involved response organizations, from international down to regional or

even local reaction units.

This paper describes the integration of the above mentioned services in the Air Traffic

Management (ATM) information exchange concept of SWIM. It proposes an implementation

concept via the world wide use of Remote Tower Operations (RTO) for surveillance of safe

landings at spaceports far away from the launch/start site.