Jellyfish-Inspired Biomimetic Architecture for Autonomous Attitude Control and Safe Landing of Reusable Launch Vehicles: Distributed Sensing, Proportional Actuation, and Quantitative Feasibility Assessment

The terminal descent and autonomous landing of reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) demands robust attitude sensing, rapid orientation correction, and controlled energy absorption at touchdown — challenges that medusozoan jellyfish (Class Scyphozoa) have solved through 500 million years of evolution. This paper presents a conceptual framework and feasibility review that systematically distils the precise neuro-sensory architecture of Scyphozoan rhopalia into actionable engineering design principles. The jellyfish sensorimotor loop follows a five-step sequence: gravitational displacement of calcium sulfate statoliths activates mechanoreceptor hair cells distributed across eight rhopalia at the bell margin; graded receptor potentials converge on the diffuse marginal nerve net; the nerve net integrates all inputs into an asymmetric activation pattern encoding tilt direction and magnitude; and subumbrellar muscle fibres — arranged as a continuous sheet activatable at any azimuth — contract proportionally to restore upright orientation. This paper argues that an architecturally equivalent system — distributed IMU sensing, majority-vote integration, and selective firing of gimballed micro-thrusters — represents a novel, biologically validated design paradigm for RLV terminal landing control. Five engineering concepts are developed and assessed for feasibility: (I) a rim-distributed redundant MEMS IMU ring; (II) a passive pendulum-mass righting mechanism with slosh-coupling analysis; (III) magnetorheological adaptive landing legs inspired by mesogleal viscoelasticity; (IV) an aerodynamic base-flare bounded to its valid dynamic-pressure regime; and (V) a gimballed distributed micro-thruster ring — the paper’s central engineering proposal — providing continuous 360° attitude authority with graceful fault degradation. Order-of-magnitude quantitative feasibility estimates are provided for 1,000 kg and 25,000 kg class vehicles. To the best of the author’s knowledge this is the first conceptual framework applying Scyphozoan sensorimotor biology to aerospace landing system design. Note on preparation: The core biomimetic analogy and the direction of the work are the author’s. The manuscript was developed and drafted with assistance from Claude (Anthropic), as detailed in the Author Contributions section. Version 2 corrects the Author Contributions statement to accurately describe the author’s role and to disclose this use of generative AI. The scientific content, figures, tables, and references are unchanged from version 1.