A design method for constellation of lifting reentry vehicles

As the reachable domain of a single lifting reentry vehicle is not large enough to cover the whole globe in a short time, which is disadvantageous to responsive operation, it is of great significance to study on how to construct a constellation of several lifting reentry vehicles to responsively reach any point of the globe. This paper addresses a design method for such a constellation. Firstly, an approach for calculating the reachable domain of a single lifting reentry vehicle is given, using the combination of Gauss Pseudospectral Method and SQP method. Based on that, the entire reachable domain taking the limit of responsive time into consideration is simplified reasonably to reduce the complexity of the problem. Secondly, a Streets-of-Coverage (SOC) method is used to design the constellation and the parameters of the constellation are optimized through simple analysis and comparison. Lastly, a point coverage simulation method is utilized to verify the correctness of the optimization result. The verif...