Aircraft safety and space vehicle hazards: How safe from space debris hazards will your future flights be?

The nexus between aviation safety and space operations has emerged as a controversial topic in the public's eye and a serious matter for space safety professionals. Media reports have drawn the public's attention to events including the closing of European airspace because of the re-entry of a Chinese upper-stage that later impacted the Indian Ocean. A recent FAA report to Congress indicated that "the probability of an aircraft downing accident in 2035 would be 0.0007 per year," based on an analysis by the Aerospace Corporation that accounted for the projected growth in global aircraft traffic and the number of on-orbit objects. SpaceX publicly objected because their analysis indicates that Starlink satellites completely burn up on re-entry. However, evidence from recent events proves that the analyzes used to predict the demise of Starlink, the Dragon trunk, and an ISS battery pallet are prone to underestimate the debris that survives re-entry as explained in Section 2.2. A FAA study of the Columbia accident used data on the actual commercial aircraft trajectories and found that the highest conditional probability of impact to any individual aircraft (given the break-up event occurred when and where it occurred) was between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 100, depending on how many fragments survived to aircraft altitudes but were unrecovered. This paper avoids the controversies by explaining what is currently done to protect aircraft from potential impacts by space debris during launch and re-entry. This paper will describe, in the simplest terms possible, the pillars of aircraft protection measures employed by the FAA during launch and re-entry, and answer several key questions:

How does the FAA establish how safe is safe enough for aircraft that are potentially threatened by a collision with space vehicle debris?

How does the FAA establish the regions of airspace that are closed or notified to ensure safety during US launch, re-entry, and disposal operations?

What is done to alert aircraft to debris hazards from unplanned or uncontrolled space debris (including natural debris such as meteoroids)?

Are the current best practices enough to sustain today's high level of aircraft safety given the potential threats from the lifecycle of large LEO constellations, including all the launches needed to deploy them, or should we be working together to develop more advanced methods?