New Generation Space Vehicle Operations in the United Arab Emirates – An Airspace and Risk Assessment

Abstract

Air Transport is a highly technocentric and rapidly evolving industry. While certain legacy systems persist, more advanced technological concepts for carrying payloads and passengers further, faster, and more efficiently place this particular industry at the forefront of the most cutting-edge research and development initiatives in the fields of autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and advanced communication, navigation, surveillance applications. While drone technologies and applications have been widely and comprehensively addressed in recent years, the incipient hypersonic and suborbital commercial transport sector has received disproportionately less academic attention. Although certain suborbital passenger transport concepts such as the German Aerospace Center’s SpaceLiner are proposed for the more distant future, other concepts have reached operational status. A recent addition into the foray has been Blue Origin and its vertically launched New Shepherd autonomous vehicle. The United Arab Emirates, an increasingly active spacefaring nation, has signaled its interest. Among the nation’s highly ambitious short and long-term initiatives is the idea of launching space tourism flights from its own soil. Blue Origin, along with other candidates, has emerged as a contender to operate its New Shepard vehicle from a UAE-based spaceport. This paper explores how Next Generation Space Vehicle Operations (NGSVO) could impact a highly dense and compact airspace when operating from and to a UAE spaceport. Preliminary results suggest that under certain circumstances, NGSVOs may indeed affect existing Air Traffic Management (ATM) operations and pose increased safety risks while leading to higher fuel consumption and larger carbon dioxide footprints of regular air traffic. To establish a benchmark for future comparisons, the current study applies traditional airspace segregation methods to the UAE airspace to accommodate a specific type of NGSVO. Operational gains may be deduced by comparing the results of future studies applying more advanced ATM concepts to those reported in the current study.