The United States Air Force and Orbital Sciences Corporation (Orbital) completed development and demonstration of a new low cost space launch vehicle for launching small satellites using surplus Minuteman II rocket motors melded with commercial launch vehicle technology. The Orbital Suborbital Program Space Launch Vehicle (OSPSLV, aka OSP Minotaur) successfully achieved all mission objectives w...

Apollo powered descent guidance (APDG) law enabled lunar module to land on the Moon successfully. Since then, in past 50 years, APDG and several of its variants have been used numerous planetary landing studies missions. As formulation does not consider drag force, is typically for rarefied environments like Mars. In this paper, we extend application atmospheric by aiding it with an acceleratio...

A possible next-generation launch vehicle may be a fully reusable, single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) aerospacecraft. This class of hypersonic vehicle includes highly integrated airframe and propulsion systems, hence fuel-optimal trajectories are of special interest. Also, since these vehicles are neither conventional aircraft nor rockets, the appropriate approach for trajectory analysis during preli...

Health diagnostics is an area where major improvements have been identified for potential implementation into the design of new reusable launch vehicles in order to reduce life-cycle costs, to increase safety margins, and to improve mission reliability. NASA Ames is leading the effort to advance inspection and health management technologies for thermal protection systems. This paper summarizes ...

In the application of adaptive flight control, significant issues arise due to limitations in the plant inputs, such as: actuator displacement limits, actuator rate limits, linear input dynamics, and time delay. A method is introduced that allows an adaptive law to be designed for the system without these input characteristics, and then to be applied to the system with these characteristics, wi...

Over the past decade, the NASA Langley Research Center developed a series of "grand challenge" applications demonstrating the use of parallel and distributed computation and multidisciplinary design optimization. All but the last of these applications were focused on the high-speed civil transport vehicle; the final application focused on reusable launch vehicles. Teams of discipline experts de...

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and self-organizing map (SOM) were applied to data mining for aerodynamic design space. These methods make it possible to identify the effect of each design variable on objective functions. ANOVA shows the information quantitatively, while SOM shows it qualitatively. Furthermore, ANOVA can show the effects of interaction between design variables on objective functio...