A Planning and Operations Toolset for Air Traffic Management of RLV's

Reusable launch vehicles present a series of unique problems in the management of the national air space. While the nominal ascent phase of reusable launch vehicles (RLV¿s) closely resembles the launch phase of an expendable launch vehicle (ELV), this can change quickly. RLV¿s have the capability to terminate flight during the ascent phase and attempt to land at the launch site or other commercial spaceports or airports. Commercial spaceports are being designed and built in non-traditional locations. Many of these spaceports are land-locked forcing vehicles launched from these spaceports to fly over populated areas and through commercial airways to reach orbit. Tools are required to manage these new dynamic spaceways. Spaceways that are shared by both standard air transportation, RLV¿s, and expendable ELV¿s. These tools will encompass the mission planning phase and the real time operations phase. This proposal will concentrate on the design of an integrated toolset that provides RLV mission planning functions that directly support real time mission operations. These functions will include; 6 degree of freedom trajectory planning for RLV operations including 4-dimensional visualization, shared situational awareness of real time operations, intelligent air traffic and RLV interference prediction, and integrated weather data and real time weather visualization.