The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has recently completed the design phase of a flight safety system to lower the cost of range operations for expendable launch vehicle missions. The autonomous flight safety system (AFSS) is being developed in three phases by a NASA team of flight systems, operations and range safety personnel.

The AFSS will be an independent subsystem that would be mounted on expendable launch vehicles that require flight safety systems. If successfully demonstrated and adopted for flight by the ELV community, this on-board system for flight termination should reduce the need for safety-specific, ground-based telemetry and radar tracking, NASA officials explained.