Abstract
We consider a flight mission to the geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for an Ariane 5 launcher, while maximizing the payload or, as a variant, minimizing the fuel consumption. We first solve the complete flight sequence up to the final orbit, assuming a maximal thrust for all propulsion systems. Then we focus on the tmospheric ascent phase, which has been studied for instance in [1, 2, 3]. We are more specifically interested in optimal tra jectories with singular arcs (flight phases with a non maximal thrust) for the boosters. Due to the presence of tabulated data in the physical model, the exact expression of the singular control cannot be obtained from the time derivatives of the switching function. An alternate way to compute the singular control is provided, and numerical experiments are carried out for for several launcher variants.
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