Space vehicles have become increasingly complex in recent years, and the number of missions has multiplied as a result of extending frontiers in the exploration of our planetary system and the universe beyond. The advancement of automatic control in aerospace reflects these developments. Key areas covered in these proceedings include: the size and complexity of spacecrafts and the increasingly stringent performance requirements to be fulfilled in a harsh and unpredictable environment; the merger of space vehicles and airplanes into space planes to launch and retrieve payloads by reusable winged vehicles; and the demand to increase space automation and autonomy to reduce human involvement as much as possible in manned, man-tended and unmanned missions. This volume covers not only the newly evolving key technologies but also the classical issues of guidance, navigation and control.

An important, successful area for control systems development is that of state-of-the-art aeronautical and space related technologies. Leading researchers and practitioners within this field have been given the opportunity to exchange ideas and discuss results at the IFAC symposia on automatic control in aerospace. The key research papers presented at the latest in the series have been put together in this publication to provide a detailed assessment of present and future developments of these control system technologies.

The papers presented at the Symposium covered the areas in aerospace technology where automatic control plays a vital role. These included navigation and guidance, space robotics, flight management systems and satellite orbital control systems. The information provided reflects the recent developments and technical advances in the application of automatic control in space technology.

In the post cold war era, the role of aerospace technology has swiftly changed from military use to civilian use. The change resulted in a closer international cooperation in developing new aerospace systems, such as the Iridium project to launch a fleet of communication satellites and the European Aero International Regional (AIR) project to build a new generation of 100-seat passenger jets. Furthermore, it is envisioned in the coming century that passengers may be able to travel between Seoul and Los Angeles in two hours with the help of the emerging technologies of aeronautical and astronautical engineering. The Global Positioning System (GPS) will bring a personal navigation system that can provide navigation information with an accuracy of less than 10 metres. Satellites will take a major role in developing a global communication system. These changes and visions wait for control engineers to solve many challenging and exciting engineering problems, and invite new ideas and practices. The goal for the symposium was to bring together from different fields and applications, with the common interest of automatic control in aerospace systems. The program consisted of state-of-the-art reviews, presentations of new results, tutorials, discussions and applications in all aspects of the dynamics and control of aeronautical and space-related systems. This covered conceptual definition, design, test, verification, operations, and post-operation analysis of spacecraft, launch vehicles, aircraft, and missiles.