The U.S. Air Force has long been interested in the next-generation space launch capabilities that might be enabled by high-speed air-breathing propulsion. Since the early 1960's, studies have examined the application of ramjet or dual-mode scramjet propulsion to potential reusable military spaceplane (MSP) concepts. Perceived advantages include flexible basing, flexible operations, hypersonic s...

NASA’s human lunar and Mars exploration program requires a new transportation system between Earth and the Moon or Mars. In recent years, unfortunately, human space exploration programs have faced myriad political, technical, and financial difficulties. In order to avoid such problems, future human space exploration programs should be designed from the start for affordability. This thesis addre...

Abstract With regard to the space field, number of sensors has grown for a middle-sized spacecraft from more than 500 at beginning twenty-first century [1] several thousands nowadays applications. Meanwhile, Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) moved their steps demonstrators commercial working systems. As result, Health Monitoring (HM) is conquered its own in field and are primary elements required...

The resource levels required for operation and support of reusable launch vehicles are typically defined through discrete event simulation modeling. Minimizing these resources constitutes an optimization problem involving discrete variables and simulation. Conventional approaches to solve such optimization problems involving integer valued decision variables are the pattern search and statistic...