Speaker
Description
Assessing spacecraft demisability during atmospheric re‑entry is essential for ensuring compliance with Space Debris Mitigation Requirements. Today, ESA’s DRAMA‑SARA toolchain is the de‑facto standard for such analyses. However, its empirical modelling assumptions and legacy conservatism increasingly drive major design decisions, often leading to unnecessarily constrained propulsion architectures, mass budgets, and disposal strategies. Recent studies at OHB indicate that DRAMA is being used far beyond its intended scope and tends to systematically overestimate survivability and casualty risk.
In our FAR 2025 contribution, we introduced OHB’s first end‑to‑end, physics‑based re‑entry modelling framework using DSMC solvers (dsmcFoam+ and SPARTA), augmented by detailed atmospheric (NRLMSISE‑00) and reactive chemistry (QK models). These simulations, applied to both capsules and full satellite geometries, revealed convective heat fluxes up to 2 to 4 times higher than DRAMA predictions at key breakup altitudes, clearly demonstrating the tool’s underlying conservatism.
Building on these results, the internal BLAZE project (Breakup & Layered Analysis of Re‑Entry) extends the comparison across the full ecosystem of re‑entry solvers (DRAMA, DEBRISK, SCARAB, PAMPERO, SACRAB) and introduces a structured cross-validation methodology jointly developed with RTech.
This contribution presents the combined results of the FAR 2025 work and the ongoing BLAZE campaign, highlighting the implications for spacecraft design and European industrial competitiveness. We show that high fidelity DSMC/CFD simulations provide realistic and physically consistent heat loads across the transitional flow regime, allowing to compare high fidelity tools with lower fidelity tools. The tool-to-tool comparison performed in collaboration with R.Tech provides more insight in potential differences between different medium and lower fidelity tools available in Europe.
The findings strongly support the need for an open discussion on DRAMA validation, conservatism, and requirements formulation within ESA’s Clean Space framework. Ultimately, our work aims to enable more balanced, evidence‑based demisability assessments that ensure safety without imposing unnecessary design penalties on future European missions.