Title: Towards Earth independence - tradespace exploration of long-duration crewed Mars surface system architectures
Abstract: In recent years, an unprecedented level of interest
has grown around the prospect of sending humans to Mars for the
exploration and eventual settlement of that planet. With the
signing of the 2010 NASA Authorization Act, this goal became the
official policy of the United States and consequently, has become
the long-term objective of NASA's human spaceflight activities. A
review of past Mars mission planning efforts, however, reveals that
while numerous analyses have studied the challenges of transporting
people to the red planet, relatively little analyses have been
performed in characterizing the challenges of sustaining humans
upon arrival. In light of this observation, this thesis develops
HabNet - an integrated Habitation, Environmental Control and Life
Support (ECLS), In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and
Supportability analysis framework - and applies it to three
different Mars mission scenarios to analyze the impacts of
different system architectures on the costs of deploying and
sustaining a continuous human presence on the surface of Mars.
Through these case studies, a number of new insights on the
mass-optimality of Mars surface system architectures are derived.
The most significant of these is the finding that ECLS architecture
mass-optimality is strongly dependent on the cost of ISRU - where
open-loop ECLS architectures become mass-optimal when the cost of
ISRU is low, and ECLS architectures with higher levels of resource
recycling become mass-optimal when the cost of ISRU is high. For
the Martian surface, the relative abundance of resources equates to
a low cost of ISRU, which results in an open-loop ECLS system
supplemented with ISRU becoming an attractive, if not dominant
surface system architecture, over a range of mission scenarios and
ISRU performance levels. This result, along with the others made in
this thesis, demonstrates the large potential of integrated system
analyses in uncovering previously unseen trends within the Mars
mission architecture tradespace. By integrating multiple
traditionally disparate spaceflight disciplines into a unified
analysis framework, this thesis attempts to make the first steps
towards codifying the human spaceflight mission architecting
process, with the ultimate goal of enabling the efficient
evaluation of the architectural decisions that will shape
humanity's expansion into the cosmos.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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Cited By Count: 7
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