Robust steering control of spacecraft carrier rockets

In the year of 2003 it was established a cooperation agreement between Ukraine and Brazil for utilization of Cyclone-4 launch vehicle at Alcantara Launch Center. The company responsible for the marketing and operation of launch services is the company bi-national Alcantara Cyclone Space (ACS). The Cyclone-4 launch vehicle is the newest version of the Ukrainian Cyclone family launchers developed by Yuzhnoye State Design Office. This family has been used for many successful spacecrafts launches since 1969. This paper is concerned with the yaw stabilization problem around a nominal trajectory for the third stage of a satellite carrier rocket similar to the Cyclone-4. Only the steering machine of the main engine is considered as actuator. The dynamic behavior of the third stage around the nominal trajectory is modeled as a fourthorder time-varying linear system whereas the steering machine is modeled as a linear dynamical system up to third order. The values of the parameters of the steering machine model are unknown, however belonging to known intervals. As the main result, the stabilization problem is solved with a proportional derivative (PD) controller. The proposed tuning approach takes into account the robustness of the controller with respect to the steering machine model uncertainties. The performance of the PD controller is demonstrated by simulation results.