Draft European standard on safety risk assessment for space missions

In the framework of European Co-operation for Space Standardisation (ECSS), new international European standards to support safety of space missions have been developed. The ECSS standards for project risk management and system safety specify the foundation of the systematic safety process required on space projects. The analytic part of this process is outlined in further detail in two new complementary standards on hazard analysis and safety risk assessment. This paper discusses the risk assessment approach in the draft ECSS safety risk assessment standard ECSS-Q-40-03. The paper gives a brief summary of what the proposed standard covers and why the standard is considered important. The paper then describes how the standard is applied: its role in space programmes, how is it made applicable, how is it to be used, etc. Furthermore, the links to other ECSS standards and the disciplines of safety and risk management are explained. While initially written for space systems, the practitioners of safety and risk analysis are invited to consider the use of the described approach for safety risk assessment also for non-space applications.