TRAJECTORY DYNAMICS ANALYSIS OF REUSABLE SUBORBITAL LAUNCH VEHICLE FOR TOURISM

Currently, there are three major reusable suborbital launch vehicles (RSLVs, or the so-called spaceplanes in many documents) developed for suborbital scientific research and suborbital space tourism (SST): Virgin Galactic's Space-ShipTwo (SS2), XCOR's Lynx and Blue Origin's New Shepard. Of which, SS2 and Lynx are the horizontal-takeoff-horizontal-landing (HTHL) type and New Shepard is the vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing (VTVL) type. Therefore, the commercial operations of SST might be expected to take place within a few years in the future. No matter the RSLV belongs to HTHL or VTVL type, both use rocket engine as propulsion system. As such, the trajectory dynamics and characteristics are very different from aviation airplane. The major purposes of this paper are to analyze the trajectory dynamics by using the characteristics of RSLV, and to make comparison with those of the aviation airplane. Analysis results show that the high-g acceleration is about 10 times and the high-g deceleration is about 15 times of airplane. Also, there is a weightlessness flight phase for several minutes. Besides, the levels of noise and vibration are very high when the rocket engine is working.