A status report on the development of the Kistler Aerospace K-1 Reusable Launch Vehicle

Meyerson, Robert E.; Taylor, Anthony P.

doi:10.2514/6.2001-2069

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The K-1 recovery process is shown in Fig. 1.3 [8,9]. Subsequent to the separation of the first and second stages, the first stage engine of the launch vehicle will be separated from the first stage and re-enter the atmosphere under the protection of an inflatable heat shield.…”

Section: Reusable Space Transportation System In Axisymmetric Configu...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Review, Prospect and Technical Challenge of Launch Vehicle

Wang

Zhang

et al. 2023

Springer Series in Astrophysics and Cosmology

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Following six decades of development, the technology of launch vehicle has progressed with respect to the dual action of demand traction and technical promotion, providing increasingly valuable high-tech services for society. Currently, the development of launch vehicle is progressing with respect to stronger capabilities, higher reliability, lowering costs, flexibility, and user convenience. Retrospectively, the global development history of the launch vehicle technology can be roughly categorized into four stages with distinct characteristics of the decades.

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Section: Reusable Space Transportation System In Axisymmetric Configu...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Review, Prospect and Technical Challenge of Launch Vehicle

Wang

Zhang

et al. 2023

Springer Series in Astrophysics and Cosmology

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“…As the name implies, the parachute recovery is achieved by installing a parachute on the launch vehicle parts and decelerating the parts by it. This technology has been successfully applied in the recovery missions and tests of various types of launch vehicles, such as Electron, 1 Vulcan, 2 K-1, [3][4][5] Ariane 5, Energy, [6][7][8] and Falcon 9. 9 This method is of high maturity, and it has the advantage of small loss of carrying capacity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A novel cable-net buffer device for recovering reusable launch vehicle: Design, dynamic modeling, and performance analysis

Wang,

Xiang,

Zhang

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C:

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At present, reusable launch vehicle technology (RLV) has become a research hotspot in the aerospace field and one of the major development trends in this industry. With reference to the aircraft carrier’s arresting cable technology, this paper puts forward a novel cable-net buffer device for recovering the first stage of launch vehicle. The device can transfer load through a cable-pulley mechanism, and then complete the first stage recovery by losing the kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy of the first stage through hydraulic dampers and preloaded counterweights. In order to analyze the performance of this cable-net buffer device, the finite element software ABAQUS is adopted to establish a rigid-flexible coupling dynamic model. In this model, the cable-pulley mechanism is simulated by connector and shell elements, the damping force of the hydraulic dampers by VUAMP subroutine, and the preloaded counterweights by mass point. And then, performance evaluation indexes of this buffer device are proposed in this paper. Meanwhile, the dynamic simulation, using the established dynamic model, is carried out under different device design parameters and working condition parameters. On the one hand, the simulation results show that the tower span and damping force have remarkable effects on the buffer performance. On the other hand, among all working condition parameters, only the fall point deviation has a significant effect on the buffer performance, but this effect is less than that of the design parameters. Finally, combing the dynamic model and the surrogate model technique, this paper obtains feasible boundaries of design parameters of the device for the subsequent detailed design of it. Researches in this paper will provide new ideas for the development of RLV.

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“…Research in reusable launch vehicles has made continuous progress in recent years. As an extension of parachute landing technology, the parachute recovery method was widely studied and applied in various rockets [6][7][8][9]. Although it is a simple, reliable, and economical method, the unpowered descent process makes it difficult to predict the final landing point of the rocket.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Powered Landing Control of Reusable Rockets Based on Softmax Double DDPG

Zhang

Dong

et al. 2023

Aerospace

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Multi-stage launch vehicles are currently the primary tool for humans to reach extraterrestrial space. The technology of recovering and reusing rockets can effectively shorten rocket launch cycles and reduce space launch costs. With the development of deep representation learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has become a robust learning framework capable of learning complex policies in high-dimensional environments. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning-based reusable rocket landing control method is proposed. The mathematical process of reusable rocket landing is modelled by considering the aerodynamic drag, thrust, gravitational force, and Earth’s rotation during the landing process. A reward function is designed according to the rewards and penalties derived from mission accomplishment, terminal constraints, and landing performance. Based on this, the Softmax double deep deterministic policy gradient (SD3) deep RL method is applied to build a robust reusable rocket landing control method. In the constructed simulation environment, the proposed method can achieve convergent and robust control results, proving the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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A status report on the development of the Kistler Aerospace K-1 Reusable Launch Vehicle

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Review, Prospect and Technical Challenge of Launch Vehicle

Review, Prospect and Technical Challenge of Launch Vehicle

A novel cable-net buffer device for recovering reusable launch vehicle: Design, dynamic modeling, and performance analysis

Powered Landing Control of Reusable Rockets Based on Softmax Double DDPG

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