Space Launch Vehicles

FiberSIM® has the Right Stuff for Designing and Manufacturing Space Launch Vehicles

As composites have received growing acceptance in a variety of industries, including aerospace, automotive and wind energy, the space industry is relying more and more on composites.

VISTAGY has been a leader in the composite design-to-manufacturing process for over 15 years and FiberSIM® composites engineering software has been used on many space programs, including the Boeing Delta Series Rockets, NASA’s Orion and composite crew module programs, and SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. FiberSIM provides the necessary CAD integrated software tools to reliably design and manufacture optimized composite structures and delivers several key advantages, including:

• Design definitions that closely integrate with finite element analysis (FEA) software to enable a concurrent design and analysis process
• Producibility simulations that alert design and manufacturing engineers early in the process to possible manufacturing issues
• Seamless transfers of all design data to manufacturing for multiple processes, including manual layup, resin transfer molding, automated fiber placement (AFP), and tape laying (ATL)

The space launch industry has always been looking for a way to build lighter weight, higher performance vehicles as a means of reducing the cost of delivering payload into orbit. Key to these efforts is the use of composite materials to provide stiffer, stronger, lighter weight structures while simultaneously reducing initial manufacturing and overall lifecycle costs. 

Working through these cost and performance tradeoffs for the use of composite materials are part of an exciting new range of “game changing” projects in the industry.  These projects focus on creating:

• Dramatically lighter weight vehicles to provide more payload capability, which helps to defray the operational cost of delivering satellites into orbit.
• Detailed, iterative structural analysis that is essential to engineering reduced weight in composite structures. FiberSIM’s industry leading solutions for creating composite definitions and communicating them with analysis tools provide a fast and reliable method to optimize designs for weight and performance.
• Reusable launch vehicles that provide tremendous savings relative to the current method of destroying the launch vehicle with every payload delivery. Reusing a vehicle requires a clear understanding of how damaging flight loads can be on structural integrity. FiberSIM provides detailed, granular definitions of the composite structure, leading to a more accurate understanding of the structure’s behavior.
• Less expensive manufacturing techniques for composite structures, thus helping to reduce costs through part consolidation and reduced fabrication time. 

FiberSIM’s capabilities have the potential to help achieve industry goals and propel the state of the art for launch vehicles into a whole new era. Learn more about FiberSIM.