Safe crew launch by design

In 1961, when the then US President John F. Kennedy made his historic "Man on the Moon" by the end of the decade announcement, US launch vehicles had only achieved about a 75% launch success rate, and only about 50% of the US launched payloads had achieved on-orbit operation. During the intervening years leading up to and through the Apollo era significant advances in launch success rates were made and this combined with the development of launch escape capability provided reasonable assurance of crew safety in those pioneering days. The 1 crew loss in 50 launches that would be forecast with an 85% reliable launcher with an equivalent escape capability was considered safe enough through the Mercury and Gemini days. The Apollo history suggested even better expected crew safety performance to the point that the designers in the shuttle era elected not to incorporate crew escape in the Orbiter design. Despite significant advances over these early days in the US and Russia and elsewhere risk of launcher failure remains, and is likely to continue to remain, significant. Historical Russian and new US launcher performance is impressive. The new US launchers have so far achieved a claimed 9 for 9 perfect launch success rate. However impressive, this performance fails to dispel the heritage based conclusion that even with growth above their heritage launchers and even with crew escape, these new US and Russian historical launchers are likely to have difficulty meeting the 1 crew loss accident in 1000 launches goal recently set by the US astronaut corps. This paper addresses the issues that limit crew safety during launch and ascent to low Earth orbit (LEO) and suggests guidelines that might provide designers with guidance on how to create new launcher designs or to modify existing launchers so as to incorporate crew safety by design. The paper will also investigate how these guidelines apply to existing launchers and one proposed new design so as to suggest crew risk vulnera- - bilities in designs that might be addressed so as to allow for crew safety benefits to accrue. Finally the paper will suggest how the application of these guidelines might allow for the astronaut suggested goal to be achieved or even exceeded in future crew launch vehicles