Range safety
spaceflight contingency to terminate a failed launch and protect people and assets on the ground
In rocketry, range safety or flight safety is ensured by monitoring the flight paths of missiles and launch vehicles, and enforcing strict guidelines for rocket construction and ground-based operations. Various measures are implemented to protect nearby people, buildings and infrastructure from the dangers of a rocket launch.
Governments maintain many regulations on launch vehicles and associated ground systems, prescribing the procedures that need to be followed by any entity aiming to launch into space. Areas in which one or more spaceports are operated, or ranges, issue closely guarded exclusion zones for air and sea traffic prior to launch, and close off certain areas to the public.
Contingency procedures are performed if a vehicle malfunctions or veers off course mid-flight. Sometimes, a range safety officer (RSO) commands the flight or mission to end by sending a signal to the flight termination system (FTS) aboard the rocket. This takes measures to eliminate any means with which the vehicle could endanger anyone or anything on the ground, most often through the use of explosives. Flight termination could also be triggered autonomously by a separate computer unit on the rocket itself.
Range operations
Closure of surrounding areas
Before each launch, the area surrounding the launch pad is evacuated, and notices to aviators and boatsmen to avoid certain locations on launch day are given. This facilitates the creation of a designated area for rockets to launch, called the launch corridor.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Range safety” as spaceflight contingency to terminate a failed launch and protect people and assets on the ground. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7292709. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Range safety” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.