An improved scheme of air temperature conditioning for payload fairing of ultralight space rockets

Special temperature conditioning systems are widely used to provide a special thermal regime of the payload of space rockets when the rockets are transported to the launch site. Most of these systems use air as the heat transfer medium. This air can flow either inside the payload fairing or between the fairing and a special temporary thermal cover installed on the fairing. However, for the case of ultralight (low payload) space rockets, these systems face difficulties in providing an acceptable temperature gradient under the payload fairing. Due to the relatively short fairing length, the difference between the air temperature in the cooling or heating cycle should be very small. As a result, the efficiency of the system also becomes relatively low. In this paper, an improved scheme of the air conditioning system for ensuring the temperature regime is proposed, which enables significant reduction of the temperature gradient under the payload fairing of the launch vehicle. Also, the proposed scheme enables significant increase of the efficiency of the thermal conditioning system for the payloads of ultralight launch vehicles.