A Bounce-Spring Docking Recycler: Energy Recovered from Spacecraft Capture by a Bound-Limited Spring

This paper presents a complete design study of a docking recycler that captures a visiting vehicle on a bound-limited compression spring and returns part of the capture energy to the station bus, computed throughout from stated assumptions. At an approach speed of 0.20 m per second the capture energy is 0.16 kJ, of which 0.10 kJ is recovered at a recovery fraction of 0.64, with a peak deceleration of 0.017 m per second squared. At half a metre per second the recovered energy rises to 0.70 kJ from a capture energy of 1.00 kJ, and three hundred reference captures in a year return 30.0 kJ in total. Every figure is a computed result of the stated model and nothing was built or tested: the study is SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED, and its limits are stated as plainly as its performance.