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This final report, dated September 10, 1996, was prepared by the Research Triangle Institute for the Department of the Air Force's 45th and 30th Space Wing safety offices. Titled Modeling Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations, it shows how rare Mode-5 failures, in which a rocket veers well off its intended flight line, are modeled in the DAMP risk-analysis program. An appendix lists Atlas, Delta, Titan and Thor launch and failure histories through August 1996.
From the source:Release of 2026-05-08 Incident: 9/10/96, N/A. This report describes the Modeling of Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations, documenting historical launch failure modes and recommending corrective actions to address them using novel modelling techniques.
In this region, breakup occurs at or shortly after vehicle failure. Beyond 170 seconds, the dynamic pressure between failure and 280 seconds stays sufficiently low so that the vehicle remains intact. The dramatic differences in impact distributions that can result at certain times during flight if the vehicle is subject to aerodynamic breakup can be seen by comparing the impact footprints in Figure 7 and Figure 8. Both patterns show 10,000 impact points from random-attitude failures of the Atlas IIAS at 130 seconds. Figure 7 is for no breakup, and Figure 8 is for a breakup q<rof 5,000 deg-lb/ft2. The data in Table 19 comprise an example of a 270,000-point sample of random-attitude failures run at 10-second intervals from 15 to 275 seconds. (For brevity, only every- other failure time is shown in the table.) Ten thousand impacts are computed at each failure time. Five-degree sectors are identified in the left-hand _column. For each time, the number of impacts in each 5° sector is shown in·the column for that time. The total number of impacts for all failure times and the percentages of impacts in each sector are given in the last two columns of the table. 9/10/96 38 RTI
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Report, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 181 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.