The emerging market of Commercial Space Transportation (CST) is not only developing efficient and cost-effective access to space but also fostering new concepts of passenger transportation. As an effect, an increase of spaceflights and suborbital launches can already be observed over the past years and further growth is expected. The same applies to the number of spaceports for launch and landing operations of space vehicles (SVs) worldwide. That said, SVs will more frequently pass through civil airspace and will evolve from rare special events to regular airspace users. The need for a safe and efficient integration of SV operations into the air traffic system is evident. Considering concepts of very high-speed intercontinental passenger transport via suborbital point-to-point flights, this integration issue is becoming even more relevant. Air Traffic Management (ATM) is playing a key role in the effort to ensure a sustainable CST system. The ATM integration concept has to follow a common approach that can accommodate all different types of commercial SV operations. It must be flexible and resilient enough to handle the uncertainties of launch and reentry events, and it has to provide measures to cope with a target level of safety for spaceflights which is still significantly lower compared to commercial airplanes. It has to be the goal to integrate all operations into one system to ensure a seamless and efficient approach. This article describes the necessary evolvement from the current state of the art of integrating spaceflight into ATM to a concept that facilitates the requirements of trajectory-based operations under the regimes of future Single European Sky and the U.S. Next Generation Air Transportation System. It shows how dedicated CST services for the System Wide Information Management can facilitate an interoperable ATM integration. To study the effects of SV operations on air traffic and to evaluate mitigation strategies and optimized ATM integration, a case study design, based on a point-to-point suborbital intercontinental passenger transport concept, will be presented.

Research is described for realizing a Remote Airport Traffic Control Center (DLR project RAiCe) for remote surveillance and control of several small airports from a central location. Work and task analyses performed in a previous project resulted in the concept of a high resolution video panorama system with zoom and augmented vision functions as controllers main HMI in the Remote Tower Center (RTC). Video-see-through augmentation of the reconstructed outside view by means of superimposed flight information and data from electronic non-visual sources is supposed to improve the controllers situational awareness. The augmented vision function allows for a compact RTO-work environment due to its potential for reduction of displays. A corresponding 180°-video panorama system was set up as experimental testbed at Braunschweig research airport which served for initial field testing. It consists of four digital high resolution CCD cameras located near Braunschweig tower, and a remotely controlled pan-tilt zoom (PTZ) camera (including automatic tracking option) with PC clusters for compression, image processing/movement detection, decompression and panorama reconstruction, and a 450 m fiberoptic Gbit Ethernet link between sensor and display clusters. Field testing of the reconstructed far view with participation of local controllers shows an effective visual resolution of <2 arcmin in agreement with the theoretical predictions. The PTZ camera provides a "foveal" vision with a high resolution exceeding the human eye (1 arcmin) within an observation angle <15°. In addition to the experimental testbed simulation systems for two-airport control are under development for support of the RTC work environment design, based on a 200°-tower-simulator with RTO-console extension and a simplified two-airport microworld computer simulation for laboratory type part task simulations.

Recently, the European Aviation Safety Agency and other civil aviation authorities introduced a regulatory framework for low- and medium-risk operations of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) where medium-risk operations fall into the ‘specific’ category. Other introduced categories are the ‘open’ category for very-low-risk operations and the ‘certified’ category for high-risk operations that are comparable to manned aviation. This framework has the potential to reduce the certification costs compared to manned civil aviation. This paper discusses the challenges for operators of high-altitude platforms who aim for medium-risk UAS operations in the ‘specific’ category. It also shows ways to obtain an operation approval in the ‘specific’ category and how to deal with the associated operational requirements to perform such long-endurance UAS missions. Moreover, problems the high-altitude platform operator has to face when applying SORA are discussed. The paper closes with a promising approach to further enable high-altitude operations and to face some of the problems that occurred in the applicability of SORA to high-altitude platform operations by the use of 4D-operational volumes and unmanned traffic management (UTM) services.

Historically, higher airspace has been used for military exercises and as transit for space vehicles. Riding on commercial space operations’ coattails, more and more vehicles are under development that will make use of higher airspace resources. This will lead to increasing interactions with conventional air traffic since these new vehicles will have to transit through lower airspaces. The management of these operations is necessary to ensure the safe and practicable shared usage of these airspaces. This paper outlines an assessment of the impact of higher airspace operations on conventional air traffic in Europe. Initially, a synthesis of possible use cases was performed, and demand scenarios were developed that served as input to a fast-time simulation. The impact on air traffic was measured by means of flight efficiency parameters. The simulation results showed that the impact is dependent on the type of operation. High-altitude platform system flights and orbital launches cause the largest deviations in flight distance, flight duration and fuel consumption. Higher airspace operation parameters, including location, time, and duration, strongly affect the impact on the conventional air traffic.