CCT Applications - Aerospace Traffic Control

Reusable launch vehicles present a series of unique problems in the management of the national and global air space. Commercial and military spaceports that support RLV's will be built inland, forcing vehicles launched from these spaceports to fly over populated areas and through commercial airways to reach orbit. Integrated command and control tools are required to manage these new dynamic spaceways that safely accommodate standard air transportation, RLV's, expendable ELV's, and military SOV's. These tools need to address both the mission planning phase and real time operations associated with these vehicles and assorted mission classes to enable class-specific goals like rapid turnaround for military sorties.

Command and Control Technologies Corp. is involved in building a path finding solution for aerospace traffic management that integrates both RLV operations and conventional aircraft operations that may also be adapted to military aircraft operations.

Major features include:

Aerospace Mission Planning
Safety/Risk Planning
Aerospace Traffic Control

It will also support collaborative operations for the following major stakeholders:

Aerospace Traffic Management Organization
Space Carrier Organizations
Spaceport Organization

The major result of this research is expected to be the translation of real-time RLV and air traffic data acquired from multiple sources into a single, collaborative, environment distributed over standard network architectures that presents a common operating picture for civil and military space operations.

To date, CCT has applied the open source Visualization Toolkit to produce a new graphics program for mission planning and analysis of space launch vehicles. The new program renders space transition corridors, mission vehicle trajectories, Air Route Traffic Control Centers and sectors, and aircraft flight routes in 2D and 3D images positioned on accurate maps of the Earth and the U.S. national airspace system. This tool is part of a CCT research project to integrate air and space traffic control.

This program can quickly call up and display the Space Transition Corridor for any mission. The red sectors are zones within the air traffic control system.

A Space Transition Corridor for a hypothetical suborbital rocket launch from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport Complex 20. (you need to stretch this one horizontally to get the right aspect ratio.

Reference Material:

Published Paper - Integrated Command and Control Toolset for Global Aerospace Operations" in a special session at the Core Technologies for Space Systems Conference on military spaceplanes hosted by the Air Force Research Laboratory in Co. Springs. The paper describes research on a toolset for managing reusable launch vehicles in the national and global air space.

Range Resources and Information

Command and Control Technologies Corporation is a computer technology company specializing in mission critical automation systems and software tools. We offer complete automation solutions, delivering products, engineering expertise, support, and training for aerospace, industrial, security, and military applications.