Radiative shock waves are ubiquitous throughout the universe and play a crucial role in the transport of energy into the interstellar medium. This fact has led to many efforts to scale the astrophysical phenomena
to accessible conditions. In some laboratory experiments radiative blast waves are launched in clusters of gases by means of the direct deposition of the laser energy. In this work, by using a ollisionalradiative
model, we perform an analysis of the plasma level populations and radiative properties of a blast wave launched in a xenon cluster. In particular, for both the shocked and unshocked material, we
study the influence of different effects such as LTE, steady-state or time-dependent NLTE simulations, plasma self-absorption or external radiation field in the determination of those properties and also in the
diagnosis of the electron temperature of the blast wave.