DESIGN OF THE HERMES ORBITAL FLIGHT CONTROLLER

This paper gives a short overview of the HERMES Spaceplane Orbital Flight Control system as it is presently under development. After a short outline of system aspects, spaceplane configuration and Guidance-Navigation-Control (GNC) related mission aspects the HERMES Orbital Flight Controller (OFC) functional and operational architecture is presented with special emphasis on hierarchical and modular design aspects. A selected number of HERMES Spaceplane Orbital Flight Control topics are addressed and their technical solutions are outlined in principle. Simulation results for some standard control tasks show the performance capabilities of the current OFC definition.