Government regulations impose stringent safety requirements on launch planners. Perhaps that's why no member of the general public or launch-site workforce has ever been killed in a U.S. launch. The Aerospace Corporation helps the Air Force's Range Safety Offices maintain this admirable record of public safety. Examples of range-safety efforts include:
Jettisoned-Body Impact-Point Prediction. For all Titan II and Titan IV launches, Aerospace performs standard analyses to validate contractors' predicted impact points for all planned jettisoned objects, including solid-rocket motors, thrust-chamber covers, payload-fairing sectors, and spent stages.
Population Overflight Risk Assessment. Overflight of populated areas carries a risk to human safety. If an anomaly brings down a launch vehicle before it achieves orbital velocity, people in its path can be injured or killed. Aerospace maintains a toolkit that can calculate the human safety risk for any trajectory; it combines detailed trajectory simulations with a comprehensive database of population density.
Sonic-Boom Footprint Prediction. A launch vehicle generates a sonic boom, and certain trajectories can produce focused shock waves that create significant overpressures. Aerospace has tools to compute sonic-boom footprints for ascent trajectories and has provided analyses for Titan IV, Titan II, and Atlas II launches.
Near-Pad-Explosion Damage Assessment. Inadvertent or emergency destruction of a launch vehicle can cause significant damage to nearby structures, possibly even destroying the launchpad itself. Aerospace has performed numerous statistical analyses to quantify the risks resulting from near-pad explosions. The methodology was recently used to evaluate the risk that a hypothetical EELV failure posed to neighboring launch facilities. Aerospace investigated multiple near-pad failure modes, calculated the probability of damage resulting from debris impact or blast overpressure, and recommended risk-mitigation procedures.