Recovery of Rocket Payloads and First Stages Using Unmanned Vehicles - a Proof-of-concept

Higher rocket launch rates encourage recovery, through greater economic potential from re-use, and in avoiding an unnecessarily large environmental impact. Recovery by autonomous aerial or surface vehicles, operating alone or collaborating, can reduce cost and increase the quality of the recovery operation, by minimizing human involvement and thus relaxing safety requirements and increasing agility. These benefits apply to all the concept ideas we evaluate, both employing aerial and surface vehicles. As a hybrid proof-of-concept experiment, we chose to study the recovery of a high-power student rocket by an unmanned surface vehicle. Here, a simulated unmanned surface vehicle is guided to the real-time predicted impact point of a physical high-power student rocket launched from Andøya Spaceport. In this case, the rocket did not have a parachute. In addition, we benchmark and demonstrate the recovery using previously recorded rocket telemetry data. While the economic potential in student rocket recovery is limited, the method is designed to scale for recovery of sounding rocket payloads or orbital rocket first stages.