Elements of Spacecraft Design

by Charles D. Brown

This text discusses the conceptual stages of mission design, systems engineering, and orbital mechanics, providing a basis for understanding the design process for different components and functions of a spacecraft. Coverage includes propulsion and power systems, structures, attitude control, thermal control, command and data systems, and telecommunications. Worked examples and exercises are included, in addition to appendices on acronyms and abbreviations and spacecraft design data. The book can be used for self-study or for a course in spacecraft design. Brown directed the team that produced the Magellan spacecraft, and has taught spacecraft design at the University of Colorado. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

610 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2003

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does a really good job explaining the concepts. Overall, I think it had really good detail on all the different elements of spacecraft design. It's a complex subject that was made easy to understand.
However, the AIAA needs to update it more regularly. The outdated technology makes space system design more challenging when you need to look up what has been used in more recent years. The in-depth discussion of technologies that are most likely no longer in use today, doesn't seem overly helpful. Understanding where things started, sure. The other issue is with the examples. There are no units shown throughout the examples so unit conversion isn't always clear and a lot of the examples aren't actually correct, based on my understanding. New equations are also given in the example, which I don't think should ever happen. For a book that starts off saying you don't want to screw up your units or you could crash into Mars, they really make things difficult to follow without showing units and switching between units (km and m for example). Coming from a physics background, the speed of light is always 3 x 10^8m/s. It doesn't need to be in km and please, spacecraft should never have any distance measurement in miles!
I have a lot of critiques for this book however, I will say again, that overall it was very well written and the explanations were good. I did an independent study where my professor was entirely unavailable and was able to understand the concepts without issue using this book alone.

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the best engineering texts I've used in the course of my education, right up their with Farokhi's propulsion book. That's not to say that it's perfect—like any technical document of this size, there's a lot of errors and typos. Several of the calculation procedures aren't exactly clear, and plenty of example problems seem to pull unitless numbers out of thin air. Also be on the lookout for equations that need modification if you switch between EE and SI units. There's a lot of confusion between weight and mass that should frankly be embarrassing to an organization with the prestige of AIAA. They aren't fatal flaws, but it helps if you have an experienced professor to point them out.

Even if you don't, though, Elements of Spacecraft Design is a good place to review and begin synthesizing domain-specific knowledge into an understanding of (primarily unmanned) spacecraft design. I enjoyed this introduction and intend to look into other books by Brown and in the AIAA Education series when I get a chance.