Design of Robust Space Trajectories Giovanni Stracquadanio, Angelo La Ferla, Matteo De Felice and Giuseppe Nicosia Abstract In this paper we apply a novel black-box optimisation algorithm to the Global Trajectory optimisation Problem provided by the European Space Agency (ESA). The proposed algorithm, called SAGES, has been applied to instances of seven trajectory design problems, comparing it with the known best solutions. The numerical results show clear improvements on the majority of the problems and, in order to investigate deeply the problems, a sensitivity and solutions robustness analysis has been performed, measuring the influence of each single variable to the objective function. 1 Introduction A crucial problem in mission analysis is planning interplanetary trajectories, which consist in launching a spacecraft from a given astronomical body (usually the Earth) along a trajectory which leads to an other; the goal of the optimisation is to provide the best trajectory, in terms of starting date, necessary fuel, mission temporal length, in order to obtain a cost-effective mission. Thus, space missions can be tackled as global optimisation problems, which are characterized by a huge search space and large plateau regions in the search landscape. Giovanni Stracquadanio Dept. of Biomedical Engineering - Johns Hopkins University, USA e-mail: stracquadanio@jhu. edu Angelo La Ferla Dept. of Mathematics & Computer Science - University of Catania, Italy e-mail: laferla@dmi. unict.it Matteo De Felice Energy and Environment Modelling Unit, ENEA, Italy e-mail: matteo.defelice@enea.it Giuseppe Nicosia Dept. of Mathematics & Computer Science - University of Catania, Italy e-mail: nicosia@dmi.unict.it M. Bramer et al. (eds.), Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXVIII, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-2318-7_26, © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011