Related papers: The optimisation of low-acceleration interstellar …
We model accelerated trips at high-velocity aboard light sails (beam-powered propulsion in general) and radiation rockets (thrust by anisotropic emission of radiation) in terms of Kinnersley's solution of general relativity and its…
Achieving relativistic flight to enable extrasolar exploration is one of the dreams of humanity and the long term goal of our NASA Starlight program. We derive a fully relativistic solution for the motion of a spacecraft propelled by…
Current spacecraft mass are mostly fuel, this is dictated by the lack of fueling stations in space and also by the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation which defines the mass ratio needed to escape earths gravity. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation…
Orbital maneuver planning is a critical aspect of mission design, aimed at minimizing propellant consumption, which is directly correlated with the total velocity change ($\Delta V$). While analytical solutions like the Hohmann and…
Gauging the benefits of hypothetical gravity control propulsion is difficult, but addressable. The major challenge is that such breakthroughs are still only notional concepts rather than being specific methods from which performance can be…
As new concepts of sending interstellar spacecraft to the nearest stars are now being investigated by various research teams, crucial questions about the timing of such a vast financial and labor investment arise. If humanity could build…
Identifying the optimal design of a new launch vehicle is most important since design decisions made in the early development phase limit the vehicles' later performance and determines the associated costs. Reusing the first stage via…
The optimization of low-thrust, multi-revolution orbit transfer trajectories is often regarded as a difficult problem in modern astrodynamics. In this paper, a flexible and computationally efficient approach is presented for the…
Space exploration plans are becoming increasingly complex as public agencies and private companies target deep-space locations, such as cislunar space and beyond, which require long-duration missions and many supporting systems and…
The paper represents an algorithm for planning safe and optimal routes for transport facilities with unrestricted movement direction that travel within areas with obstacles. Paper explains the algorithm using a ship as an example of such a…
The container relocation problem is a combinatorial optimisation problem aimed at finding a sequence of container relocations to retrieve all containers in a predetermined order by minimising a given objective. Relocation rules (RRs), which…
Agile attitude maneuvering maximizes the utility of remote sensing satellite constellations. By taking into account a satellite's physical properties and its actuator specifications, we may leverage the full performance potential of the…
Path Planning methods for autonomously controlling swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining momentum due to their operational advantages. An increasing number of scenarios now require autonomous control of multiple UAVs, as…
In this paper, the routing in massive low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks is studied. When the satellite-to-satellite communication distance is limited, we choose different relay satellites to minimize the latency in a constellation at…
The habitable zones of low-mass stars are characterized by escape speeds that can be a few times higher than the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Owing to the exponential dependence of the required fuel mass on the terminal speed for chemical…
Platooning is a way to significantly reduce fuel consumption of trucks. Vehicles that drive at close inter-vehicle distance assisted by automatic controllers experience substantially lower air-drag. In this paper, we deal with the problem…
Interstellar comets arrive with key ingredients for deep-space platforms already in place: volatile inventories convertible to propellant, natural rotation providing continuous attitude variation, and hyperbolic trajectories that carry them…
New means of interstellar travel are now being considered by various research teams, assuming lightweight spaceships to be accelerated via either laser or solar radiation to a significant fraction of the speed of light (c). We recently…
We assess the possibility of reducing the travel time of a crewed mission to Mars by examining four different propulsion methods and keeping the mass at departure under 2500 tonne, for a fixed architecture. We evaluated representative…
Interest in the exploration of, and the establishment of a human settlement, on Mars is rapidly growing. To achieve this, rapid transit will be required to bring crucial cargo. Current missions to Mars take 150 days, which would be too long…