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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.

  • p. 83 …Section 3 and Appendix B provide the reader with a fuller understanding of the nature and…
configurations (see Section D.1.4). The results, summarized previously in Table 6 of
Section 5.1, are repeated here in Table 27. Flight phases 0 - 1 go from liftoff through
first-stage or booster cutoff, while flight phase 2 extends through second-stage or
sustainer cutoff. Although failure probabilities for all flight phases are listed in Table 2,
only malfunctions during flight phases Othrough 1 have significant effects on launch-
area risks.
Table 27. Failure Probabilities for Atlas, Delta, and Titan
Predicted Failure Probabili
Vehicle
Flight Phase
O- 1
Flight Phase
0 - 2
Atlas
Delta
Titan
0.022
0.010
0.040
0.031
0.013
0.064
Absolute overall failure probabilities for Atlas, Delta, and Titan were based only on
flight results from "representative" vehicle configurations. Because of the small
number of failures in the individual representative samples, test results for all
configurations (including Thor) were combined into a single sample and filtered to
estimate relative failure probabilities for the five failure-response modes in program
DAMP (see Section 5.2). The results for flight phases O- 2 and O- 1, together with
recommended values for new launch systems, were summarized in Table 15 and Table
16, respectively, and are repeated here in Table 28 and Table 29.
Table 28. Recommended Res onse-Mode Percenta es for Fli ht Phases O-2
Response Mature Launch New Solid Systems New Liquid Systems
Mode S stems (F = 0.993) (F = 0.996) (F = 0.999)
1 0.4 2.2 7.4
2 5.4 4.3 2.3
3 0.1 0.4 1.7
4 86.2 80.4 73.3
5 7.9 12.7 15.3
Table 29. Recommended Res
Response
Mode
1
2
3
4
5
Mature Launch
S stems (F = 0.993)
0.5
7.4
0.1
81.9
10.1
New Solid Systems New Liquid Systems
(F = 0.996) (F = 0.999)
3.4 10.7
6.6 4.3
0.6 2.4
74.5 67.0
14.9 15.6
For Atlas, Delta, and Titan, absolute probabilities for the individual response modes
were obtained by multiplying absolute failure probabilities from Table 27 by the
relative probabilities shown in the second columns of Table 28 and Table 29. The
results, presented originally in Table 17, are repeated below in Table 30. To obtain
9/10/96 75 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.