Abstract: This paper presents a method of calculating the flight parameters of spacecraft reentry trajectory. In this method, the variation of spacecraft mass center position and the flight velocity with the altitude is chosen, and then the other flight parameters of reentry trajectory are calculated. Based on the kinetic and dynamic equations of the mass center of spacecraft, the formulae used in the method are derived. Using these formulae, an example of the flight data of the Columbia shuttle is calculated to check the validity of the method . The agreement between the calculated results and the real reentry results is encouraging and shows that the proposed method is an effective and simple one suitable for the preliminary reentry trajectory design.

Key words: spacecraft, reentry trajectory, algorithm