The Air Force is anticipating customer resistance toward its use of automated flight safety systems at its space launch ranges, according to a key official.
“(Customers) have their system, they have their budget, they’re not going to want to make that leap,” Air Force Spacelift Range and Network System Division Chief Col. Janet Grondin said Friday at a Peter Huessy breakfast series event on Capitol Hill.
Grondin called resistance from “a few” customers the Air Force’s “biggest challenge” with moving to automated flight safety. She said, from what the Air Force can tell, the commercial world is already making that leap.
“Just like Microsoft can’t support every operating system they ever built, the rangers aren’t going to be able to support backward compatibility forever, so we’ll have to work with our users moving forward toward autonomous flight safety,” Grondin said.
Grondin said the Air Force is moving toward automated flight safety to help increase the number of launches at its two ranges: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., and Vandenberg AFB, Calif. She told Defense Daily Friday the service expects the first launch using automated flight safety at the Cape within 12 to 18 months as the Air Force has projected as many as 40 launches there in 2016.
The Air Force is making progress toward implementing automated flight safety to track rockets as they ascend into space. If a rocket gets on an unsafe path, officials want to be able to destroy the rocket before it causes collateral damage.
The traditional method is to manually send a destruct signal that eventually reaches a receiver on a rocket that fires off an ordnance. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) chief Gen. John Hyten called the traditional method of flight tracking “old,” “creaky” and “fragile” March 17 at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.
The service is phasing out the use of flight tracking radars in favor of Global Positioning System (GPS) metric tracking. An overtaxed flight tracking radar at Cape Canaveral overheated last year and delayed launches. Grondin said an automated flight safety system has software and algorithms that determine if it reaches “limit lines” and sends a signal for the ordnance on the rocket to terminate.
Grondin said one advantage of automated flight safety is that it reduces reliance on “high reliability” ground infrastructure because everything necessary to make that destruct decision is now on the rocket. Hyten said in March he wants an automated flight safety system in place by 2016, when the Air Force shuts down the range at Vandenberg to move U.S. Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) (Defense Daily, April 14).
Grondin is scheduled to retire May 29, according to AFSPC. She’ll be replaced by Col. Thomas Rock.