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Showing results for tags 'inclination burn'.
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I recently desired to take a small manned craft into polar orbit, so on an unrelated mission I hauled up a pod stuck to 800 fuel and a tiny engine and hurled it into the void. But going from equatorial LKO to polar LKO is not best done from LKO. If I did a single maneuver the delta-V would have come close to 3200! I know that with large inclination changes it can be cheaper to raise your apoapsis, do the inclination change, and then re-circularize, and that was certainly the case here, but is there any easy method to determine whether this is the case? Or more importantly in the example, is there an easy way to approximate how much the apoapsis should be altered for the most efficient maneuver? Or a ratio of altitude delta-V to inclination delta-V? I just did a bunch of permutations of the two maneuvers until it seemed like the diminishing returns weren't really worth the effort anymore, but I was wondering if there was a "right" way to figure this out that doesn't require an actual rocket scientist.