Can ROS be used for real time orbital flight simulation?

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There's a few layers to this. Overall ROS is a software framework for robotic systems. It is likely that you will find packages in the ROS ecosystem that would be valuable for you to use in controlling your rocket model in simulation.

On the otherside what gvdhoorn mentions for the actual simulation you will want to use a simulation engine. I'm most familiar with Gazebo so I'll talk about that one. It is capable of simulating physics, rendering sensors including cameras and has been used in many domains in space including simulating things on the ISS as well as Lunar and Mars environments and satellite modelling. There are elements specific to launching rockets that are quite specific and there will likely need to be spcific plugins for elements such as the rocket engines and the air drag on your rocket. However if you have that in matlab you can likely port those elements of the simulation model. The benefit of using something like Gazebo is that you'll get integration with the rendering engine for both simulating sensors as well as your rocket in space. The only main limitation is that you should not expect to be able to integrate would be computation fluid dynamics. It's a rigid body simulator. However, if you're looking for realtime simulation I don't think that CFD approaches are expected to be in scope anyway.

As with almost all projects. The more effort you put into it the better the outcome will be. You can invest in improving the parts of the simulation that are most critical to your use case and leverage the rest of the existing systems. And you can leverage a lot of the integrations with ROS for debugging and development such as the aformentioned rviz.

Without a much more detailed requirements I can't guarentee that it will work for you. But in general there's not a reason not to use it for rocketry unless you require full CFD.