The America’s cup of rocket science
GTOC
"Global Trajectory Optimization Competition"
"The America’s cup of rocket science"
Overview of GTOC
The Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GTOC) is a prestigious international challenge where top aerospace and academic teams solve complex interplanetary trajectory design problems. Launched in 2005 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT), the competition pushes the limits of orbital mechanics, mission planning, and computational optimization.
ESA has sponsored and hosted multiple GTOC editions, including GTOC-1 (2005) and GTOC-4 (2010), reinforcing its commitment to advancing space trajectory optimization. The competition has since been hosted by NASA’s JPL, CNES, Politecnico di Torino, and Tsinghua University, among others, making it a benchmark event in astrodynamics research.
For Fun
I participated as an individual team in 4 of the 5 competitions from GTOC-4 to GTOC-8 from 2010 to 2015. My participation was a private journey as I never shared my results or ranking relative to teams from the top universities and space agencies around the world.
All I am going to share for the moment is that I had a novel approach that scored far ahead of most other, if not all, teams that did make submissions.