Conceptual Design of an Air Launched Three-staged Orbital Launch Vehicle

Måns Rasmussen will present his thesis work, done at Saab Dynamics in Karlskoga, on Friday 11/6 11:15.

Topic

The objective of this study was to design a 1’300

kg three-staged air-launched vehicle capable of being launch a

nanosatellite into a Sun-Synchronous Orbit at 500 km orbital

altitude from the JAS 39 Gripen jet fighter. This was achieved

by performing theoretical calculations for the required nozzle and

solid propellant grain configurations for the first two solid stages

and the necessary liquid propellant configuration for the third

stage. Secondly, two approaches where investigated in solving the

boundary value trajectory ascent problem; assuming a sigmoidal

steering function for the pitch and transcribing the problem into a

nonlinear program, resulting in a parametric steering law solved

using a Sequantial Least Squares Algorithm. Ultimately resulting

in a launch vehicle design capable of launching a 8.4 kg payload

into the targeted orbit with suggested modifications to increase

the possible payload to 13.3 kg.