Rethinking the National Approach to Launch Timing Decisions

Every successful space mission begins with a successful launch. As space access costs lower and launch efficiencies progress, launch tempos are increased creating more access to space while simultaneously increasing congestion and the number of launch failures. Successfully traversing Earth’s atmosphere is just the first hurdle since terrestrial weather is growing increasingly volatile, causing outright launch cancellations, and providing winds that induce launch trajectory errors. Entering space, launch vehicles push their payloads into an increasingly crowded orbital environment that will be, for the next few years, exposed to increased solar activity. The current approval process for licensing U.S. commercial launches includes a verification process that the launch trajectory and operations occur with an acceptably low risk of collision. Regardless of destination orbit, the primary threat facing ascending launch vehicles is the potential for collision with anthropogenic objects in the near-Earth space environment. As more objects are placed into space, launch collision avoidance analysis thresholds remove more and more launch opportunities, and given proposals for a growing number of megaconstellations, current policies could preclude launch to certain orbits altogether. To ensure sustained U.S. access to space, this paper explores the challenges with the current approach and ways to improve launch timing decisions. After exploring alternative options, the launch decision process is framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), the methodology most applicable to an updated space launch timing decision support tool.