You first have to choose the vehicle you will work on: either 1- Suborbital vehicle for high-speed long-range transportation or 2- Vehicle servicing LEO.

You will then address one of the following topics:

1. For type 1 vehicle, from the few characteristics given for a suborbital vehicle capable of high-speed long-range transportation, you will define a set of high-level requirements that affect both vehicle design and trajectory. You will add some other constraints linked to the fact that use of the vehicle is close to airliner or business jet ones, while offering a concept allowing less than one hour trips,

Or

2. For type 2 vehicle, you will define a set of high-level requirements that affect both vehicle design and trajectory. In particular, you will need to take into account the fact that the vehicle may carry non-professional passengers, fragile equipment for various lengths of time depending on the mission (a week in free flight and up to six months when docked to a station), may or may not be launched under a fairing, and may have to undergo a restrictive atmospheric re-entry requiring the vehicle to be re-configured for a new flight,

Or

3. For type 2 vehicle, you will study the design of a universal docking system enabling the vehicle to dock to commercial space stations. To do this, you will define a set of high-level requirements related to the various functions to be performed by the system. You will detail the docking sequence, taking inspiration from various existing or past cases and propose the architecture that best meets the requirements. Your work should not be a copy of what NASA, ESA or other companies are proposing, but you can draw inspiration from them. In particular, you could consult the document International Docking System Standard IDSS IDD rev. F dated July 2022.

 

Androgynous docking interface - Axial view

 

For the first two topics, your final file will at least contain:

• Logic used for functional analysis,
• Identified requirements and constrinsts,
• Trajectory profile,
• A pre-project type architecture of vehicle, with the design, geometric and mass characteristics able to cover elements coming from functional analysis.

 

For the third topic, your final file will at least contain:

• Logic used for functional analysis,
• Identified requirements and constrinsts,
• a pre-project type architecture of the docking system, with the design, geometric and mass characteristics able to cover elements coming from functional analysis.

 

 

General characteristics of reference vehicles:
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