In weapon systems development, live fire tests have been frequently adopted to evaluate the performance of the systems under development. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure safety in the test ranges where the live fire tests can cause serious hazards. During the tests, a special care must be taken to protect the test and evaluation (T&E) personnel and also test assets from potential danger and hazards. Thus, the development and management of the range safety process is quite important in the tests of guided missiles and artillery considering the explosive power of the destruction. Note also that with a newly evolving era of weapon systems such as laser, EMP and non-lethal weapons, the test procedure for such systems is very complex. Therefore, keeping the safety level in the test ranges is getting more difficult due to the increased unpredictability for unknown hazards. The objective of this paper is to study on how to enhance the safety in the test ranges. To do so, an approach is proposed based on model-based systems engineering (MBSE). Specifically, a functional architecture is derived utilizing the MBSE method for the design of the range safety process under the condition that the derived architecture must satisfy both the complex test situation and the safety requirements. The architecture developed in the paper has also been investigated by simulation using a computer-aided systems engineering tool. The systematic application of this study in weapon live tests is expected to reduce unexpected hazards and test design time. Our approach is intended to be a trial to get closer to the recent theme in T&E community, "Testing at the speed of stakeholder's need and rapid requirement for rapid acquisition."