Launch Vehicle Ascent CFD for the Space Launch System

This paper will discuss the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for the Space Launch System (SLS) Program to model the ascent phase of flight. The ascent phase begins shortly after the vehicle clears the launch tower and extends to the first staging event. To model SLS’s ascent, over one thousand numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations are solved, and this analysis has been repeated for five different SLS configurations. To manage this demanding ascent CFD task, the SLS program has developed the Computational Aerosciences Productivity & Execution (CAPE) software, which is introduced in the paper. The paper also discusses some of the ways that CFD and high-end computing have advanced in the last decade and offer some comparisons to CFD used in the Space Shuttle Program.