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The past decade has shown a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned tethered vehicles in worldwide marine fields. These are used for inspection, debris removal and object retrieval. During the past ten years, the RCV-225 vehicle has become an industry standard as a small size, highly maneuverable, inspection tool. It is able to operate in very confined areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. In the past three years major subsystem changes have been made to the RCV-225 vehicle to further increase its utility. These improvements have included the high thrust motor, an FM telemetry system, a color television interface, an image size measurement system, improved on-line video annotation capability, and an emergency locator beacon which is automatically deployed upon tether cable severance. For more extensive underwater work the larger RCV-150 vehicle provides greater power, and operational versatility.

To keep pace with man's increased scope of space exploration in the future, it is imperative that fluid power system technology continue to expand its methods and techniques to be able to meet the severe environments indicated on the various planets. Support equipment industries have a prime new field to develop in the maintenance of vehicles in space. Various investigations have discovered basic data that will prove valuable in projecting effective fluid power support for space craft outside the Earth's atmosphere.

The cost of Department of Defense maintenance coupled with the need for improved maintenance in many aerospace activities has resulted in large changes to the approach of maintainability. For hydraulic controls and systems for airborne vehicles, recent procedures have been instituted which put special and continued emphasis on maintainability from the inception of a program and not as an after-the-fact operation. These changes have resulted in detailed improvements in maintainability through both procedural and component design improvements. This has resulted in marked field improvements, ease of maintenance and improved operational times.

With support equipment now being needed in space operation, a radical change is being made to the support industry. This paper describes these changes in respect to hydraulic support equipment for space applications. To meet new requirements for present ground missile servicing equipment, new units of higher performance are required. However, support equipment for lunar and other planet operations require hydraulic type support equipment using cryogenic fluids. Other types of nonstandard hydraulic controls for space support would be the use of pulse rockets for both vehicle and personnel movements.

Aircraft hydraulic systems have progressed from simple to complex, reliable systems, and in the future, with the Mach 3 aircraft, will be called upon to perform even more tasks. A review of past accomplishments, with a presentation of areas where progress is needed is examined in this paper.