Hardware-in-the-Loop for Safe Aerospace Simulation

  • Industry Served: Aerospace
  • Technology: LabVIEW / FPGA / PXIe
  • Products & Services: Hardware-in -the-loop simulation
  • Customer Profile: Blue Origin, LLC is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company
  • Business Challenge: The company has a program for manned space flight. Training and preparation for first human flight requires extraordinary measures of safety and reliability.
  • Solution: S5 engineers worked with the company to create a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation for one of the major subsystems.
  • Benefits: The FPGA HIL system was able to achieve the tight timing requirements necessary to fully simulate the hardware in a safe and controlled environment.​​​​
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(c) Blue Origin, LLC

The Challenge

The goal of Blue Origin's New Shepard program ​is human flight. The company had successfully conducted a number of unmanned flights and was leading up to the first human flight.

It was important to be able to train the operations crew for every contingency to make it as safe as possible for human passengers. However, some scenarios would be difficult or dangerous to create for real. It would be necessary to simulate some of them in a way that was safe, but still realistic.
Blue Origin is honored to present the enclosed historic first human flight patch to the S5 Solutions team as a token of our appreciation and respect for your team's contribution, commitment, and perseverance in helping Blue Origin achieve fist human flight for the New Shepard program.
- G.F., Blue Origin

The Solution

On July 20, 2021, Blue Origin flew its 16th New Shepard flight to space, and its first with astronauts on board. The flight was a great success and a milestone for the company.

The S5 contribution to the effort involved creating a HIL simulation for one of the major subsystems of the rocket. The simulator is used for testing and training. It can simulate virtually any condition, such as faults, and emergency situations, in a controlled environment. That allows training scenarios to be done with as many real components as possible, while simulating conditions and situations with complete safety.

The Results

The system S5 helped to create was able to provide a means to realistically and safely simulate a wide variety of situations, to provide better training and preparedness for safe human flight. There have now been multiple successful human flights of New Shepard.
We extend our sincere gratitude to the employees of S5 Solutions for demonstrating their dedication to the high-performing standards necessary to meet customer expectations.
- G.F., Blue Origin