Operational Atmospheric Landing Guidance for Reusable Rockets

Abstract

This work focuses on the development and the analysis of atmospheric landing guidance solutions for reusable rockets in the context of the CALLISTO project, a first-stage demonstrator jointly developed by DLR, JAXA, and CNES. The most recent developments of the scenario are discussed, with a special emphasis on the handling of a complex operational constraint arising from the physical limitations of the actuators in use. We propose a simple technique to avoid multi-phase modeling of the landing guidance problem due to the aforementioned limitations, and show some numerical results obtained for one of the reference test flights of CALLISTO.