14 CFR Part 431 - LAUNCH AND REENTRY OF A REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLE (RLV)

The FAA is amending its regulations concerning the collective risk limits for commercial launches and reentries. These changes include: Separating the risk limits for commercial launches and reentries; aggregating the risk posed by impacting inert and explosive debris, toxic release, and far field blast overpressure; limiting the aggregate risk for these three hazards to 1 × 10 −4 ; reducing the number of significant digits used in launch and reentry risk analysis; and various non-substantive clarifying revisions. These changes update FAA regulations to reflect the United States Government's greater experience with commercial launch and reentry and to align more closely the FAA's risk standards with those of other United States Federal agencies, while continuing to protect public safety.

This action would streamline and improve commercial space transportation regulations' general rulemaking and petition procedures by reflecting current practice; reorganizing the regulations for clarity and flow; and allowing petitioners to file their petitions to the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation electronically. Further, it would expand the option to satisfy commercial space transportation requirements by demonstrating an equivalent level of safety. These changes are necessary to ensure the regulations are current, accurate, and are not unnecessarily burdensome. The intended effect of these changes is to improve the clarity of the regulations and reduce burden on the industry and on the FAA.

The FAA proposes to amend the collective risk limits for commercial launches and reentries. Under this proposal, the FAA would separate its expected-number-of-casualties (E c ) limits for launches and reentries. For commercial launches, the FAA proposes to aggregate the E c posed by the following hazards: Impacting inert and explosive debris, toxic release, and far field blast overpressure. The FAA proposes to limit the aggregate E c for these three hazards to 1 × 10 − 4 . For commercial reentries, the FAA proposes to aggregate the E c posed by debris and toxic release, and set that E c under an aggregate limit of 1 × 10 − 4 . Under the FAA's proposal, the aggregate E c limit for both launch and reentry would be expressed using only one significant digit. The FAA also proposes to clarify the regulatory requirements concerning hazard areas for ships and aircraft. The proposed rule would require a launch operator to establish a hazard area where the probability of impact does not exceed: 0.000001 (1 × 10 − 6 ) for an aircraft; and 0.00001 (1 × 10 − 5 ) for a water-borne-vessel.