Strategies for affordable human Moon and Mars exploration

The U.S. Vision for Space Exploration calls for NASA to undertake human exploration of the Moon and Mars. This endeavor must be performed in an affordable manner in order to be successful. This thesis outlines a series of affordability strategies that could be considered as part of the Vision for Space Exploration. Analyses of specific options for affordable human Moon and Mars missions along with integrated exploration campaigns are presented. Significant results for lunar missions include recommendations to employ extended pre-descent loiter for sortie missions to more challenging sites and the use of a single launch approach, as opposed to NASA's current 1.5 launch baseline, for crewed lunar missions. There appears to be significant opportunity for commonality between Moon and Mars exploration systems if appropriate choices are made during system development. Robust Mars missions appear to be achievable with the Earth launch and departure system currently under development by NASA, without the need for investments in advanced propulsion options such as nuclear thermal or electric propulsion. The affordability of the lunar campaign would be enhanced greatly by the use of dedicated cargo flights for lunar outpost deployment, in contrast with NASA's current plan to incrementally deploy an outpost with crewed flights alone.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Wooster, Paul Douglas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Edward F. Crawley.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38528

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38528