The overall objective of this project is to develop and demonstrate an integrated guidance software system that addresses the end-to-end mission of an RLV (pre-flight planning through landing). The ultimate benefits from this technology will reduce operations (recurring) costs. The projected high flight rates based on current market studies (and necessary to keep per flight costs low) will require guidance software that is much less expensive to support and maintain relative to state of the practice approaches used in the launch industry today. Lowering operations costs involves; (1) reducing the manpower required to plan, design and validate the end-to-end mission, and (2) reducing the turn-around time of developing a validated, flight ready mission guidance load (in hours instead of months). Ascent, on-orbit, entry and abort guidance schemes will be linked to a streamlined, automated mission design environment to allow rapid mission development. Highly reliable mission software validation results from the tight coupling of the vehicle flight software in a real time flight equivalent processor integrated with a PC-based vehicle simulation environment. An improved, operationally efficient automated entry guidance algorithm will also be matured.
Potential Commercial Applications:Significantly reducing operations cost required to design and validate the guidance system for existing launch vehicles. This enhancement will also enable lower cost expendable and re-usable launch vehicles.
