ATI's Fundamentals of Orbital & Launch Mechanics course

Summary: Award-winning rocket scientist Thomas S. Logsdon has carefully tailored this comprehensive four-day short course to serve the needs of those military, aerospace, and defense-industry professionals who must understand, design, and manage today’s increasingly complicated and demanding aerospace missions. Armed with 400 full-color visuals, Logsdon will emphasize the practical rules of thumb and physical insights that will help you understand the mysteries of powered flight maneuvers and the beneficial properties of space. The lessons learned will help you lay out performance-optimal missions in concert with your professional colleagues, including shuttle replacement, revisit the moon, and conquer Mars. View course sampler Each student will receive a new personal GPS Navigator with multi-channel capability. Instructor: Thomas S. Logsdon has accumulated more than 30 years experience with the Naval Ordinance Laboratory, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, Boeing Aerospace, and Rockwell International. His research projects and consulting assignments have included the Tartar and Talos shipboard missiles, Project Skylab, and various interplanetary missions. Mr. Logsdon has also worked on the Navstar GPS project, including military applications, constellation design and coverage studies. He has taught and lectured in 31 different countries on six continents and he has written and published 1.7 million words, including 29 technical books. His textbooks include Striking It Rich in Space, Understanding the Navstar, Mobile Communication Satellites, and Orbital Mechanics: Theory and Applications. Contact this instructor (please mention course name in the subject line) What You Will Learn: How do we launch a satellite into orbit and maneuver it to a new location? How do we design a performance-optimal constellation of satellites? How can we switch from one orbit to another using the Hohmann transfer maneuver, the bi-elliptic transfer maneuver, the plane-change maneuver, and various combinations of these three maneuvers? Why do planetary swingby maneuvers provide such profound gains in performance, and what do we pay for these important performance gains? How to deorbit hazardous space debris using equipment that never leaves the ground. How can we design the best multistage rocket for a particular mission? What are Lagrangian libration-point orbits? Which ones are dynamically stable? How can we place satellites into halo orbits circling around these moving points in space? What are JPL’s gravity tubes? How were they discovered? How are they revolutionizing the exploration of space? Course Outline: Concepts from Astrodynamics. Kepler’s Laws. Newton’s clever generalizations. Evaluating the earth’s gravitational parameter. Launch azimuths and ground-trace geometry. Orbital perturbations. Satellite Orbits. Isaac Newton’s vis viva equation. Orbital energy and angular momentum. Gravity wells. The six classical Keplerian orbital elements. Station Station-keeping maneuvers. Rocket Propulsion Fundamentals. Momentum calculations. Specific impulse. The rocket equation. Building efficient liquid and solid rockets. Performance calculations. Multi-stage rocket design. Enhancing a Rocket’s Performance. Optimal fuel biasing techniques. The programmed mixture ratio scheme. Optimal trajectory shaping. Iterative least squares hunting procedures. Trajectory reconstruction. Determining the best estimate of propellant mass. Expendable Rockets and Reusable Space Shuttles. Operational characteristics, performance curves. Reusable space shuttles: the SST, Russia's Space Shuttle. Powered Flight Maneuvers. The classical Hohmann transfer maneuver. Multi-impulse and low-thrust maneuvers. Plane-change maneuvers. The bi-elliptic transfer. Relative motion plots. Military evasive maneuvers. Deorbit techniques. Planetary swingbys and ballistic capture maneuvers. Optimal Orbit Selection. Polar and sun-synchronous orbits. Geostationary orbits and their major perturbations. ACE-orbit constellations. Lagrangian libration point orbits. Halo orbits. Interplanetary trajectories. Mars-mission opportunities and deep-space trajectories. Constellation Selection Trades. Existing civilian and military constellations. Constellation design techniques. John Walker’s rosette configurations. Captain Draim’s constellations. Repeating ground-trace orbits. Earth coverage simulation routines. Cruising along JPL’s Invisible Rivers of Gravity in Space. Equipotential surfaces. 3-dimensional manifolds. Developing NASA’s clever Genesis mission. Capturing stardust in space. Simulating thick bundles of chaotic trajectories. Experiencing tomorrow’s unpaved freeways in the sky. New Ways to Conquer Space. Solar electric propulsion. Mass drivers. Electromagnetic catapults. Fission and fusion propulsion sources. Anti-matter space drives. Tethered satellites. Project Skyhook. The Skyhook complex. Two dozen promising alternatives to today’s inefficient chemical rockets. Comments from Recent Attendees: "Excellent course. Can't imagine anyone with more knowledge." "Friendly instructor .. excellent speaker .. extremely knowledgeable." Tuition: Tuition for this four-day course is $1895 per person at one of our scheduled public courses. Onsite pricing is available. Please call us at 410-956-8805 or send an email to ati@ATIcourses.com. Register Now Without Obligation