Launcher flight control design using robust wind disturbance observation

Abstract The development of effective load relief strategies is key to the improvement of launcher flight performance as it enables a joint increase of wind resilience and decrease of mass. This is particularly relevant for reusable launchers, which are aimed at maximising operational availability and payload capacity. Yet, despite various load relief advances in the aeronautics and wind energy sectors, classical feedback-only techniques remain the state-of-practice for launchers. In this article, an improved load relief functionality for reusable vehicles is proposed based on the use of a disturbance observer for on-board wind anticipation and a load relief compensator driven by the estimate of the wind for its amelioration. Two space systems are used to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach. First, it is applied to a 3 degrees-of-freedom nonlinear simulation model of DLR’s EAGLE vertical-flight demonstrator. Then, it is applied to a 6 degrees-of-freedom nonlinear simulation model of a generic lightweight, reusable launch vehicle. For both cases, the results highlight the benefits of using this type of wind-estimation/load-relief compensation schemes. Further, for the second case, which uses thrust vector control and planar fins for ascent and descent attitude control, it is also shown that the use of fins during ascent (which is not common practice), can further improve launcher performance.