SPACEWORKS ENTERPRISES INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N231-006

Description

Air-launch weapon system store separation dynamics need to be fully characterized to ensure safety and weapon controllability during the separation phase. The current 6-DOF store separation used by the NAVAIR’s Store Separation Branch is NAVSEP. As a legacy FORTRAN-based tool, NAVSEP lacks commercial-grade software development, documentation, support, and upkeep, nor can it take full advantage of modern computational capabilities or easily integrate into modern workflows. These limitations on have made it difficult for store separation design teams to keep pace with the advancement in complexity of air-launch weapons systems and aircraft platforms. SpaceWorks proposes to develop a new weapons separation toolset using state-of-the-art computer program methods and software utilities as a replacement to NAVSEP. This toolset will be based in a modern programming language and built from the ground up to take advantage of today’s multithreaded high performance computing architectures, and to be integrated into modern automation environments for batch execution and MDAO design studies. This new toolset will be a commercial-grade software product with thorough documentation, ongoing maintenance, and technical support. It will be cross-platform compatible with modern versions of Windows, Mac OS, and RedHat Linux, and would include a visualization tool built in Unreal Engine 5. To develop this new toolset, SpaceWorks will leverage its company background and expertise in store separation analysis and commercial software development. From 2019-2020, under the X-60A development program, SpaceWorks performed the store separation assessment required by the Air Force SEEK EAGLE Office for certification of the X-60A rocket vehicle carriage and release from the Gulfstream G-III aircraft, including the development of a custom 6-DOF trajectory toolset capable of modeling X-60A’s unique flight profile and handling high-fidelity multibody aerodynamics databases. From 2015-2020, SpaceWorks developed QuickShot under SBIR sponsorship into a fully capable 3-DOF trajectory optimization software suite. SpaceWorks now has over 15 active customers of QuickShot across DOD, NASA, aerospace prime contractors, and commercial space/startup sectors. During the Phase I base activity, SpaceWorks proposes to create proof-of-concept software executables for (1) a 6-DOF equation-of-motion solver demonstrating store dynamics propagation; (2) a miss distance calculator demonstrating two-body geometry proximity calculations based on CAD geometry files; and (3) a visualization tool in Unreal Engine 5 demonstrating integration of CAD geometry files, animation of store separation, and user interface capabilities. SpaceWorks will also use these executables to evaluate execution time for complex problems and on high-performance computing architectures. Finally, SpaceWorks will plan a development roadmap for the prototype software package to be developed under the Phase II SBIR effort.