Space transportation plays a principal role in space development in order to realise and ensure safe and efficient transfer from the Earth to space as well as within space. Interest and demand for space transportation have been growing and diversifying rapidly in the last few decades, leading to an increasing number of launches for a wide variety of scientific, technological and commercial missions. The applications and purposes range from space travel and utilisation via reusable spaceplanes and launch vehicles to interplanetary and deep-space exploration for scientific missions.

 

 

Spacecraft and payload are exposed to severe environments that totally differ from the Earth in each phase of the mission sequence including launch, ascent, orbiting, operation, re-entry and landing. It is therefore crucial for successful space transportation to develop optimum and robust systems with desirable performance and safety so as to accomplish the mission objectives. Accurate understanding of physical phenomena and their influence on the system is fundamental to the design of spaceflight systems and development of space technologies.

Our laboratory, in collaboration with space agencies and national/international academic institutes, conducts multidisciplinary research to develop thorough insights into:

• Physical phenomena and their interactions
• Key design factors and effects on performance

in system engineering approaches employing state-of-the-art methodologies, aiming to realise next-generation space transportation to travel from the Earth to space and into deep space.