Supersonic and stable flight of beam riding vehicle using optimized multiple pulses

Active laser control can realize stable posture of aero-driving-type laser propulsion using genetic algorithm (GA) controlled mirror actuating system, but system delay appears from the operating process and the GA calculation. To estimate a reality of the active control by the mirror actuator, the system delay is introduced into our flight simulation, and the numerical result shows that the vehicle can achieve km-order flight altitude with keeping beam-riding strategy, whereas 15-ms system delay exists. Additionally, for achieving the supersonic flight, arrayed 400 lasers and single sub-laser are irradiated to the vehicle with suppressing the vehicle acceleration to less than 10 G. By staggering incident timing of the arrayed lasers, we can control the vehicle oscillation caused by large beam power and higher flight speed by following the optimized beam-riding flight.