Airspace Modeling for Reentry Authorization

The August 13, 2025, White House Executive Order 14335, “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” includes a focus on reentry specifically to determine “whether to expand the conditions that demonstrate reliability for a reentry vehicle, sufficient to protect against a high-consequence event on reentry.” Mitigating risk of a high consequence event can involve both space operators and airspace planners. NASA’s Air Traffic Operations Lab (ATOL) is uniquely positioned to facilitate the modeling, analysis, and visualization of both controlled and uncontrolled reentry effects on air traffic for more than 29 million square miles of airspace, including the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The lab is connectable to space operators through its Aviation Sim Net for operational feasibility assessments. Its application with partners will facilitate the development of system level requirements for performing safety analysis and streamlining the reentry approval process.

This paper highlights foundational capabilities needed to model the airspace, air traffic, and aspects of air traffic control to enable research of space traffic reentry through active airspace to land at spaceports. It also highlights why these simulation capabilities are needed to inform policy decisions by providing a repeatable evidence-to-authorization pipeline to facilitate decision making regarding reentry policy, licensing, and airspace management enabling support for Executive Order 14335. The foundational capabilities reside at NASA Langley Research Center and are poised to be integrated in assessments with partners.