Model reduction by subsystem balancing: application to the Space Station

Assembly of the international Space Station will require many construction flights. For each of these, plume impingement from the braking maneuvers of the vehicle delivering the next component will excite flexible motion in the partially-constructed station. In order to be able to analyze this efficiently, it is highly desirable to have reliable model reduction techniques for flexible structures such as these, which have many lightly-damped, closely-spaced modes. That is the subject of this paper.