Building a Low-Cost Soyuz Simulator to Teach Orbital Navigation

Space flight presents many dynamics unseen in any other domain. As such, they can be often hard to teach, and to have students develop an intuition for, even at a university level. A great benefit of cost efficient low-fidelity simulators is that they can enable users to directly interact with complex situations such as those encountered during space missions, whilst keeping a low learning curve for the user thanks to abstraction or simplification of the situation in question. Simulators can enable their users to start developing an intuitive understanding of complex topics such as orbital rendezvous, spacecraft docking, re-entry and navigation by instruments after only a few hours. This paper presents the design and build process, as well as the use cases of a low-fidelity simulator for the Soyuz TMA spacecraft built at the International Space University for educational purposes. The simulator is designed to provide a simplified and cost-efficient rendition of the on-board instruments and controls in a Soyuz TMA spacecraft descent capsule using commercially available components andallow students to manually perform in-orbit maneuvers that astronauts might perform over the course of a real mission. The paper focuses on design challenges associated with developing a user-friendly simulator without losing important aspects of how the Soyuz is controlled and behaves, discussing design decisions and trade-offs performed. The exact hardware and software architecture used in the final version of the simulator is also detailed.