Estimate of Avoidance Maneuver Rate for HASTOL Tether Boost Facility

摘要

The Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch (HASTOL) Architecture uses a hypersonic airplane (or reusable launch vehicle) to carry a pay load from the surface of the Earth to 150 km altitude and a speed of Mach 17. The hypersonic airplane makes a rendezvous with the grapple at the tip of a long, rotating, orbiting space tether boost facility, which picks up the pay load from the airplane. Release of the payload at the proper point in the tether rotation boosts the payload into a higher orbit, typically into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), with lower orbits and Earth escape other options. The HASTOL Tether Boost Facility will have a length of 636 km. Its center of mass will be in a 604 km by 890 km equatorial orbit. It is estimated that by the time of the start of operations of the HASTOL Tether Boost facility in the year 2020. there will be 500 operational spacecraft using the same volume of space as the HASTOL facility. These operational spacecraft would likely be made inoperative by an impact with one of the lines in the multiline HASTOL Hoytether~(TM) and should be avoided. There will also be non-operational spacecraft and large pieces of orbital debris with effective size greater than five meters in diameter that could cut a number of lines in the HASTOL Hoytether~(TM), and should also be avoided. It is estimated, using two different methods and combining them, that the HASTOL facility will need to make avoidance maneuvers about once every four days if the 500 operational spacecraft and large pieces of orbital debris greater than 5 min diameter, were each protected by a 2 km diameter miss distance protection sphere. If by 2020, the ability to know the positions of operational spacecraft and large pieces of orbital debris improved to allow a 600 m diameter miss distance protection sphere around each object, then the number of HASTOL facility maneuvers needed drops to one every two weeks.