Minimum time-to-climb trajectories are generated for a high performance atmospheric flight vehicle. Variational solutions obtained via Pontryagin's minimum principle are used as a benchmark result. For comparison, near-optimal solutions are generated using a recently introduced direct optimization technique. The new approach, which relies on a representation of the dynamical system in terms of differential inclusions, has excellent convergence properties and does not require initial guesses for the controls. The results show excellent agreement.
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