The NASA Langley Research Center has been performing studies to address the feasibility of various single-stage to orbit concepts for use by NASA and the commercial launch industry to provide a lower cost access to space. Some work on the conceptual design of a typical lifting body concept vehicle, designated VentureStarTM has been conducted in cooperation with the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. ...

in this study, the problem of determining an optimal trajectory of a nonlinear injection into orbit problem with minimum time was investigated. the method was based on orthogonal polynomial approximation. this method consists of reducing the optimal control problem to a system of algebraic equations by expanding the state and control vector as chebyshev or legendre polynomials with undetermined...

Control systems prototyping is usually constrained by model complexity, embedded system configurations, and interface testing. The proposed control system prototyping of a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) with a docking hoop (DH) to recover an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named AUVDH using a combination of software tools allows the prototyping process to be unified. This process provides ...

In this section, we examine the space launch needs of U.S. military, civil, and commercial space sectors. The potential development and operating costs for a small fleet of military TAVs are reviewed and compared with the costs associated with a small expendable launch vehicle. The potential development costs for commercial RLVs are also briefly reviewed. Next, we examine U.S. launch policy and...

Launch vehicle design is a multidisciplinary process involving different disciplines such as aerodynamics, structure, propulsion and trajectory. This latter key discipline in the it used to assess overall performance of by solving an optimal control problem system nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Usual Multidisciplinary Design Optimization methods for launch consider trajectory auxili...