Principles Of Spacecraft Systems Engineering, VOLUME 1: Astrodynamics, Mission Analysis, Space Environments, Attitude Control, and Propulsion

In most spacecraft engineering texts, the argument stops exactly where it becomes interesting. A sentence begins “it can be shown that,” and the result arrives without the reasoning that produced it. For a student, that gap turns understanding into memorisation. For a working engineer it is worse, because a relation with no visible assumptions cannot be judged, only trusted. Spacecraft engineering does not forgive that. A vehicle cannot be inspected, repaired, or observed once it separates from the launcher. Every gram of propellant it will ever use is carried at launch, and every parameter is coupled to every other one through mass. Decisions must be right before launch, and an engineer handed only results has no way of knowing when a result has quietly stopped applying. This volume was written on the premise that the intermediate steps are the content, not the overhead. Every significant result is derived rather than quoted, and the conditions for its validity are stated alongside it. Eighteen chapters take one small Earth-observation satellite from a blank page to a sized vehicle, and each chapter opens by locating its subject inside a design loop introduced in the first chapter, so nothing arrives without a place to sit. What you will take from it: Complete derivations from stated assumptions to the final relation, with worked examples that show every step, every unit, and every intermediate value. An explicit account, at the close of every chapter, of exactly where that chapter’s model breaks and what a real analysis would do instead. The ability to run a coupled mass and power estimate to convergence, select an orbit from a mission need, and build the six budgets that hold a design together: mass, power, velocity increment, pointing, data, and link. A method for turning an environment into requirements: erosion from oxygen fluence, dose behind a chosen shield thickness, upset rate in a memory, penetration probability against a bumper, and the launch loads and test levels the vehicle must survive. Practical sizing of an attitude architecture and a propulsion system, from disturbance torques and control bandwidth to nozzle performance, tank design, and the honest trade between chemical and electric propulsion. Two hundred and sixteen practice problems with a complete answer key that explains the reasoning behind each result. Desk-reference appendices: constants with their provenance, frame and time conventions stated rather than assumed, quick-reference orbit and environment tables, a chapter-tagged symbol list, a glossary, and an index. Coverage runs across lifecycle, requirements and verification, architecture, trade studies, budgets and margins; astrodynamics, orbit determination, perturbations and transfers; mission analysis, orbit selection, constellations and formation flying; the vacuum, plasma, atomic oxygen, radiation and debris environments; launch loads and testing; attitude dynamics and control; and chemical and electric propulsion. It is written for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students meeting spacecraft design in a formal course, for practising engineers who have arrived in the space sector from an adjacent discipline and need the whole vehicle rather than the corner of it they were hired to work on, and for small-satellite and constellation teams who need defensible numbers early in a study. It is an educational text rather than a design standard, and it says so plainly. The rules of thumb come with the conditions under which they fail, and the running case study includes the budgets that refuse to close, because a study that produces no open items has concealed them rather than resolved them. Click the "BUY NOW" button to get your own copy.