I recently launched the Explorer 1 historical addon using the built in autopilot. I noticed that the orbit I ended up in using the autopilot was much lower than what the historical Explorer 1 orbit actually was.
This got me to thinking how do you determine a launch trajectory for something like the JunoI/Exporer 1 rocket/satellite for orbiter? Trial and error, MFD (note Launch MFD doesn't seem like it would be too useful because it does not support multistage rockets), tables, spreadsheet, software, other?
Also curious on how they determined the trajectory in real life for something like the Explorer 1 back in the late 50's vs how they would do it today. Guessing there were a whole lot more high level math calculations done by hand in the 50's vs computer software to do it today.
I did quite a bit of searching both on this forum and on the internet, but didn't find any good answers to the above questions.
This got me to thinking how do you determine a launch trajectory for something like the JunoI/Exporer 1 rocket/satellite for orbiter? Trial and error, MFD (note Launch MFD doesn't seem like it would be too useful because it does not support multistage rockets), tables, spreadsheet, software, other?
Also curious on how they determined the trajectory in real life for something like the Explorer 1 back in the late 50's vs how they would do it today. Guessing there were a whole lot more high level math calculations done by hand in the 50's vs computer software to do it today.
I did quite a bit of searching both on this forum and on the internet, but didn't find any good answers to the above questions.