A Six Degree Of Freedom Launch Vehicle Simulator For Range Safety Analysis

ABSTRACT: Failure of a launch vehicle during its launch or flight might pose a hazard to the general public. The United States Air Force Space Command (USAFSC) operates the United States launch facilities and ensures safety to the general public, launch area and personnel, and foreign land masses in case of such a failure. To ensure safety, USAFSC currently uses extensive ground-based systems, which are expensive to maintain and operate and are limited to the geographical area. To overcome these drawbacks, NASA proposed a concept called Space- Based Telemetry and Range Safety (STARS) which uses space-based assets to ensure safety. The STARS concept requires support tools in the form of simulation softwares that provide the ability to quickly analyze new (or changes in) concept and ideas, an option not easily accomplished with hardware only. Trajectory and link margin analysis tool is one of these crucial support tools required by STARS. My study focused on modeling the full dynamics of a launch vehicle and development of a MATLAB based six-degree-of-freedom simulator for generating nominal and off-nominal trajectories as part of the trajectory and link margin analysis. In my study, the J2000 coordinate frame and the vehicle-centered horizontal frame were used as the reference frames to define the position and orientation of a launch vehicle, respectively.