Attitude control of the landing demonstrator PHOENIX

Phoenix is a national German un-powered landing demonstrator, which was designed as a precursor project within the frame of the next generation launcher program. A first in-flight demonstration has been successfully performed in May 2004 with three fully automated landings on a concrete landing strip at the NEAT test range in Sweden. The emphasis of this paper is on the attitude control of Phoenix. After a brief summary of the overall control structure, the paper describes in detail the design steps leading to the attitude control algorithm and presents flight data from the test