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09/03/2018 (1) What algorithms and calculations are involved in SpaceX rocket landings?

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What algorithms and calculations are involved in


SpaceX rocket landings?
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3 Answers

Paul Bevillard, Windows 7, Arch Linux.


Answered May 1, 2017 · Upvoted by Brett Morrison, former Director, Enterprise Information
Systems at SpaceX (2015-2016)

The person responsible for SpaceX’s landing capabilities is aerospace engineer


Lars Blackmore. There is a link to an article he published in National Academy
of Engineering. Just go to Lars Blackmore's Research and click on the ‘article’
tab.
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Tyler Anderson, works at SpaceX


Updated 21h ago

I can only offer my guess. First, the baseline planetary landing is done using a
gravity turn (the Apollo lunar lander used this). It is a very simple maneuver
where you estimate your current altitude and velocity and figure out when to
thrust in order to reach zero velocity near the surface. It is accomplished with a
very simple equation:

Now, this is far simpler than most landers would use today, especially with a
small landing platform and winds to deal with. But it can get you pretty close
with the trajectory design. You can choose a nominal trajectory with a burn time
based on the gravity turn or something similar, then in flight just use the fins
and thrust vectoring in order to stay on that nominal trajectory. Of course, what
you *think* is the nominal trajectory could actually put you in the water due to
droneship drift and other factors. The droneship probably communicates

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09/03/2018 (1) What algorithms and calculations are involved in SpaceX rocket landings? - Quora

directory with the rocket, since the relative position between the two is
ultimately what matters. So basically, the rocket predicts the trajectory it needs
to meet with the drone ship and reach zero relative velocity, then it calculates
the thrust force required to stay on that trajectory, then it uses the control
system to achieve that thrust force.

Another option is an advanced numerical guidance algorithm that does not use
a nominal trajectory: it creates a new optimal trajectory on-the-fly. I found one
publicly accessible paper co-authored by a guy from SpaceX:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings...

Companies do this kind of thing all the time without any real use, so its not
guaranteed that this is even related to current rocket landing algorithms, but I
imagine something like it could be used. The math is far too complex to explain
here but it involves advanced topics in optimal control theory.

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Anonymous
Answered Jul 11, 2016

On the surface, the math is quite simple. In fact, the question is asked as an
exercise in Steven Boyd’s convex optimization course (14.8,
http://stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxboo... ). Reading through the chapters leading
up to 14 in the textbook, also available online, will give you an idea. Related Questions

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When the SpaceX rocket landed on the ship, the
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Does SpaceX use any deep learning (or machine
is algorithmically easy. learning) to land rockets?

In practice, implementation will be quite a lot more difficult, but this is a start. What are the next technological achievements for
SpaceX after the rocket landing in April 2016?
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