The Fly a Rocket! programme is an intensive training course in rocket design and construction aimed at undergraduate students. The open-ended assignments, as well as the hands-on campaign, were the perfect lab-test for an engineering project. Activities like this prepare students for the problems faced in professional life, in commercial or research careers, and provide an active transfer between universities and institutions like ESA or sector companies.

Deep space missions are recently gaining increasing interest from space agencies and industry, their maximum exponent being the establishment of a permanent station in cis-lunar orbit within this decade. To that end, autonomous rendezvous and docking in multi-body dynamical environments have been defined as crucial technologies to expand and maintain human space activities beyond near Earth orbit. Based on analytical and numerical formulations of the relative dynamics in the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem (CR3BP), a family of optimal, linear and nonlinear, continuous and impulsive, guidance and control techniques are developed for the design of end-to-end rendezvous trajectories between co-orbiting spacecraft in this multi-body dynamical environment. To this end, several modern control techniques are effectively designed and adapted to this problem, with particular emphasis on the design of low cost rendezvous manoeuvres. Finally, the designed hybrid rendezvous strategies, combining both discrete and continuous control techniques, are effectively tested and validated under several start-to-end deep space testbench mission scenarios, where their performance is compared and quantitatively assessed with a set of performance indices.

Deep space missions, and particularly cislunar endeavors, are becoming a major field of interest for the space industry, including for the astrodynamics research community. While near-Earth missions may be completely covered by perturbed Keplerian dynamics, deep space missions require a different modeling approach, where multi-body gravitational interactions play a major role. To this end, the Restricted Three-Body Problem stands out as an insightful first modeling strategy for early mission design purposes, retaining major dynamical transport structures while still being relatively simple. Dynamical Systems Theory and classical Hamiltonian Mechanics have proven themselves as remarkable tools to analyze deep-space missions within this context, with applications ranging from ballistic capture trajectory design to stationkeeping. In this work, based on this premise, a Hamiltonian derivation of the Restricted Three-Body Problem co-orbital dynamics between two spacecraft is introduced in detail. Thanks to the analytical and numerical models derived, connections between the relative and classical Keplerian and CR3BP problems are shown to exist, including first-order linear solutions and an inherited Hamiltonian normal form. The analytical linear and higher-order models derived allow the theoretical finding and unveiling of natural co-orbital phase space structures, including relative periodic and quasi-periodic orbital families, which are further exploited for general proximity operation applications. In particular, a novel reduced-order, optimal low-thrust stationkeeping controller is derived in the relative Floquet phase space, hybridizing the classical State Dependent Ricatti Equation (SDRE) with Koopman control techniques for efficient unstable manifold regulation. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated and validated within several end-to-end low-cost stationkeeping missions, and comparison against classical continuous stationkeeping algorithms presented in the literature is also addressed to reveal its enhanced performance. Finally, conclusions and open lines of research are discussed.

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