Contributions of Engineering Risk Assessment to the Artemis Program

Speaker: Scott Lawrence, NASA Ames Research Center
April 21, 2022

Abstract

The Engineering Risk Assessment (ERA) team at NASA Ames Research Center is responsible for providing estimates of abortability with respect to various failure modes of the Space Launch System (SLS). Abortability is defined as the probability of successful survival of the immediate consequences of a launch vehicle failure.

Quantitative assessment of this parameter involves evaluation of the likelihood that the initial manifestation will evolve into occurrence of large-scale, crew threatening explosions, as well as evaluation of the risks associated with these explosions, should they occur.

The presentation describes the role of this type of analysis, as well as the tools and processes that have been developed and applied to generate the abortability data.

Funded by NASA’s SLS Program.

Biography

Scott Lawrence is an aerospace engineer in the Systems Analysis Office at NASA Ames Research Center. Scott began his career at Ames in 1986 working on hypersonic CFD. For the past 15+ years, his focus has been on the application of physics-based modelling and simulation to the estimation of launch vehicle crew risks. Currently, Scott is the Engineering Risk Assessment (ERA) point of contact to the Space Launch System Induced Environments discipline. The ERA group has been responsible for generating estimates of SLS failure consequences in terms of crew safety which is used in the assessment of loss of crew probabilities.

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