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  • 1 week ago
Neutralisation protocol: behind the safety that protects lives at every space launch

The Flight Safety Division tracks Ariane 6's path in real time and can destroy it to protect people. "Euronews" talks to an engineer ensuring all goes well.

READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2026/08/31/neutralisation-protocol-behind-the-safety-system-that-protects-lives-on-every-launch

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00:03Behind the roar of the engines and the visual spectacle of each liftoff at Europe's spaceport in French Guiana,
00:09the critical division is at work whose role tends to go unnoticed, unless something goes wrong, the flight safety division.
00:17Your news spoke to one of the engineers who makes sure it all runs smoothly.
00:21The flight safety division is responsible for the protection of people from the launch onwards until the decommissioning of all
00:27the rocket parts involved in the launch.
00:29We do this by tracking the rocket with a trajectory analysis in real time and also thanks to the analysis
00:36of weather data in real time before the launch.
00:39So it goes very fast. We are trained to act very fast in a very coordinated way.
00:45So we have a simulator in which we train every week, sometimes a couple of times a week, so that
00:52we have qualifications to be able to act very fast during the launch.
00:56So it is a decision that is taken among all the teams, and then we decide to stop the flight
01:03by the neutralization command.
01:05Very simply, we have a flight corridor that is calculated before each launch, and if the rocket goes through this
01:10flight corridor,
01:11it means that it can get dangerous, so we stop the flight and we interrupt the flight.
01:16So we have a flight corridor until we overfly the first countries.
01:20So then we are not above ocean anymore, and so we stop the intervention possibility.
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