International launch vehicles database with groundtrace capability

The aim of this thesis is three-fold. First, to make available to the space transportation industry a more comple- te and a more updated informations deck on all the commercial launch vehicles available throughout the world. Second, to use the Orbital Mechanics laws to lay out the process involved in carrying out a groundtrace design. Third, to develop a compu- ter program in support to the database for the launch vehi- cles and to provide graphics support for the ground trace map- ping trajectory. The program was tested for different known cases so as to validate the codes for the ground trace as well as for the database files retrieval system. In all of the cases tested, it works as expected.