Microsecond-Class Powered-Descent Optimization via Exact Condensation and Strong Convex Regularization

Abstract

Fuel-dominant powered descent can be written as a convex program, but the usual full-state epigraph formulation still carries many state variables, fuel epigraph variables, and dynamics equalities. In addition, the pure-fuel objective provides no strong-convexity curvature. This paper combines three structural reductions. First, a dimensionally consistent low-weight energy term makes the control solution unique. Second, a terminal-state sensitivity recursion eliminates every intermediate state exactly; invertible row normalization turns the 30-node baseline with 300 primal variables and 174 equality multipliers into a problem with 90 control variables and six terminal multipliers. Third, the shared radial structure of the fuel norm and thrust ball gives an exact closed-form proximal operator consisting of group shrinkage followed by magnitude clipping. The condensed problem is solved with a fixed-budget extrapolated proportional--integral projected-gradient iteration implemented in fixed-size C17 arrays. In a Mars powered-descent case with energy weight 0.02 and relative reference-solution tolerance $10^{-3}$, the iteration count decreases from 2744 for the pure-fuel full-state epigraph baseline to 93, while the fuel metric increases by only 0.033\%. The mean end-to-end solve time is \SI{68.2}{\micro\second}, and P99 is \SI{128.1}{\micro\second}, on an Intel i7-10875H. Because the thrust set in this test case is already a convex ball, the contribution is fast solution of the convex core rather than a new lossless-convexification theorem.