Preliminary design of a cabin escape system for a suborbital vehicle aimed at parabolic flights

Abstract

The paper deals with the conceptual design and sizing of a cabin escape system to be applied to a trans-atmospheric transportation system. At first, the role of suborbital vehicles towards the development of a hypersonic transportation system is presented. From this analysis, it has been clear that one of the key points in enhancing the public consensus is to demonstrate a higher level of safety and reliability with respect to the current space vehicles. Since the time of the Space Shuttle enterprise, the development of a proper escape system has been considered crucial to diminish the risk of loss of lives per mission, moving from space-like reliability characteristics to values closer to the aeronautical case. In particular, this paper presents the conceptual design of an escape system for a single stage vehicle aimed at parabolic flights. The proposed design methodology starts with the identification of the major requirements that will lead the design and sizing activities. Then, special attention is devoted to the identification of the required capabilities of a Cabin Escape System and to the selection of the proper subsystems able to guarantee these functionalities. Indeed, considering the high-level of complexity of such a system, during the design process, specific attention should be paid to the impact of on-board systems integration on the overall transportation system architecture and layout. At this purpose, a proper utilization of CAD models can ease the integration process allowing fast verification of mass and volume budgets as well as integrated simulation techniques could be useful. Furthermore, the possibility of exploiting this system during the different phases of the mission should be properly evaluated and, eventually, a preliminary impact risk analysis is reported.