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Department of the Air Force Report, 1996

U.S. Department of War · 1996-09-10 · 181 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

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F =0.98. The conditional probability of a Mode-5 response was assumed to be 0.08
(from the last line of Table 15), so the absolute probability was 0.031 x 0.08 = 0.0025.
For the remaining cases in Table 21, the same assumptions were made for the total
failure probability and for the probability of a Mode-5 response. •
a:,mgTable 21.Sh • Constants and R 1eaet d Risks for Atlas HAS
Ps
TB
(sec)
Breakup qa:·
(deg-lb/ft2) B A
Mode-5 Ee
(x 10-6)
0.005 118 14,000 * 1,000
(baseline)
3.00 227
0.0025 280 14,000 * 1,000 3.00 49.1
(new P. & T..)
0.0025 280 . none 1,000 1.90 139.8
20,000 2.75 73.7
10,000 3.20 33.4
5,000 3.45 19.8
0.0025 280 none 50,000 3.15 144;9
20,000 4.10 75.6
10,000 4.50 37.1
5,000 4.75 21.8
0.0025 280 none 100,000 3.40 144.8
20,000 4.30 79.8
10,000 4.75 36.1
5,000 5.00 21.1
0.0025 280 none 500,000 4.00 143.6
20,000 4.85 79.9
10,000 5.30 35.9
5,000 5.55 20.8
0.0025 280 none 5,000,000 4.75 144.8
20,000 5.65 77.7
10,000 6.10 34.2
5,000 6.30 22.0
* Interpolated from Figure 14
As seen from Table 21, the Mode-5 risks are highly dependent on A and insensitive to
the value chosen for B provided a proper choice is made for A. Even for values of B as
different as 1,000 and 5,000,000, the Mode-5 risks (qa =5,000) differ by only 12%. This
difference drops for all other values of B. In fact, the differences probably have more to
do with the choice of A than to any inherent difference in results due to the choice of B.
For Atlas IIAS, 24% of the total Mode-5 Ee in the launch area is due to one population
center, and 51 % of the total Ee to only five population centers (see page 49 of Ref [3]). If
values of A had been chosen so that theoretical distributions and random-attitude-turn
distributions more nearly matched for the radial directions to these population centers,
9/10/96 50 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.