Launch Site Selection Using Inland Commercial Spaceports for Constellation Deployment

As nontraditional, inland spaceports start to become operational, there is a need to understand the viability of deploying satellite constellations from these potential commercial offerings for launching. This work investigates how utilizing a small launch vehicle with these nontraditional spaceports can deploy a low Earth orbit constellation in each timeframe, competing with the traditional means of constellation deployment. This problem is framed as the “launch routing problem,” which is inherently time variant and dynamic for deploying multiple constellation planes. After determining the feasible launch sites for the mission of interest, the optimal launch sites and launch sequences which enabled rapid constellation deployment are identified. In addition, this work investigates how the satellite phasing ∆V budget and delay time between consecutive launches from the same launch site impact optimal launch site selection. The results provide initial insights toward using developing inland spaceports.