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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

Euronews Next is a future-focused news section covering global innovation, science and technology with a European perspective. Our dedicated team of journalists aims to educate and inspire today’s leaders by providing them with analysis and insights into the people and organisations shaping our future

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00:03Behind the roar of the engines and the visual spectacle of each liftoff at Europe's spaceport
00:08in French Guiana, the critical division is at work whose role tends to go unnoticed,
00:13unless 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
00:25onwards until the decommissioning of all the rocket parts involved in the launch.
00:29We do this by tracking the rocket with a trajectory analysis in real time
00:33and also thanks to the analysis of 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
00:52so that we have qualifications to be able to act very fast during the launch.
00:56So it is a decision that is taken among all the team 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
01:09and if the rocket goes through this flight corridor, it means that it can get dangerous
01:13so 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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