Safety Policies

This page sets out the safety policies that govern the engineering and operation of OrbitExSpace systems. OrbitExSpace Inc. ("OrbitExSpace", "we", "us") is currently at the terrestrial development stage; the flight-oriented policies below describe the framework we apply now in design and will apply in future when our systems operate in flight or on orbit. Safety is a design constraint at OrbitExSpace, not an afterthought.

Any future flight will be conducted only after a flight safety analysis has identified, evaluated, and mitigated hazards to the public, to personnel, and to property. Flight commit criteria will be established in advance and enforced without exception. We will not fly a system whose safety case is incomplete, and we will delay or abort when criteria are not met.

Mission safety applies across all phases — launch, cruise, surface operations, and end-of-life. We design for safe failure modes, define safing procedures, and provide the autonomy needed for a system to protect itself when human intervention is delayed or impossible.

Future spacecraft will be designed with redundancy, fault detection, isolation, and recovery capability appropriate to the mission. Critical functions will be single-fault tolerant where required, and the spacecraft will be capable of entering and recovering from a safe mode autonomously.

Future payloads will be qualified for their intended environment and will comply with the safety requirements of the launch provider and the relevant authority. Hazardous payloads will be analyzed for their failure modes, and integration will be controlled under a documented safety process.

OrbitExSpace is not a launch operator. When we launch, we do so as a customer of a licensed provider and we comply with the provider's integration and safety requirements. We do not develop, manufacture, or operate orbital launch vehicles at this time.

Any future operation on a launch range will comply with the range safety requirements of the range operator and the FAA. This includes flight termination system requirements where applicable, hazard area analysis, and coordination with the range safety officer. We will not deviate from range safety rules.

Ground safety applies to our current work. We maintain a safe working environment in our facilities and at analogue field sites, with hazard analysis for new activities, documented procedures for hazardous operations, and stop-work authority for any participant who identifies an uncontrolled risk. Every individual has the right and the obligation to stop unsafe work.

Engineering safety is embedded in how we design, not bolted on at the end. We conduct hazard analysis early in design, trace safety requirements through verification, and prefer inherently safe designs over mitigations. Where a hazard cannot be eliminated, we apply the hierarchy of controls: elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, and personal protective equipment, in that order.

Systems safety at OrbitExSpace treats the system as a whole, including hardware, software, the operating environment, and the human interface. We perform systems-level hazard analysis, identify cross-subsystem interactions, and verify that the integrated system meets its safety requirements, not only its components.

Hardware is designed with failure modes in mind. We derate components appropriately, design for tolerant failure modes, and qualify hardware to the environments it will face. Mechanical systems are designed to fail safe; electrical systems are designed to prevent hazards from propagating.

Safety-critical software is developed to a documented process with requirements traceability, code review, and testing appropriate to criticality. We identify safety-critical software functions, analyze their failure modes, and apply the rigor needed to justify reliance on them. We do not treat passing tests as proof of safety; we build the safety case from requirements upward.

Autonomy is central to our work. Autonomous systems are designed with defined operational envelopes, bounded authority, and the ability to transit to a safe state when the environment or the system's own state falls outside the envelope. We test autonomy in progressively more challenging scenarios and we do not deploy an autonomous behavior whose failure modes we do not understand.

Where we use machine learning or adaptive algorithms in safety-relevant roles, we characterize their behavior, bound their authority, and maintain a deterministic safe fallback. We do not delegate safety-critical decisions to opaque models without an external guarantee. Robotics behaviors are verified across the range of conditions they may encounter, not only nominal cases.

Functional safety is achieved through a documented process of hazard analysis, safety requirements allocation, design, verification, and validation. Where applicable, we use recognized functional-safety standards (such as ISO 26262, IEC 61508, or their aerospace equivalents) as a reference framework, and we document the safety case so that the reasoning behind our safety claims is transparent and reviewable.

Where our systems interact with humans — on Earth now, and potentially in future habitats — we design for safe interaction: defined separation, force and proximity limits, predictable behavior, and clear means for a human to stop or override an action. We do not assume a human will get out of the way; we design the robot so that they do not have to.

OrbitExSpace Inc.
Los Angeles, California
safety@orbitexspace.com