Benchmarking of crewed lunar and mars mission architectures

Abstract

© 2020 The MITRE Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Fuel selection is a strong driver of the mass fraction for many proposed lunar and Mars missions, but fuel technology trends have not been comprehensively evaluated for their impact on the system in literature. We evaluate the impact of fuel selection on overall lunar architectures. Our analysis shows that although hydrogen architectures have a higher wet mass cost, they provide more payload capacity to the lunar surface than non-hydrogen architectures given the same number of campaign launches. The Moon has been viewed as a stepping stone for future planetary exploration, so we evaluate both Mars and lunar architectures. We functionally decompose architectural decisions and compare key campaign decisions across 18 notable Mars architectural studies. The 18 landers are classified into four groups depending on which of the four the functional capabilities the lander performs, namely outbound transit, mars descent, mars ascent, and inbound transit. We find that there is no strong relationship between the Martian landers’ wet mass and the length of crewed Martian surface. Furthermore, fuel type selection did not have a clear trend with the aforementioned capabilities. The lack of similarities across Mars architectures suggests the reference studies had a wide range of depths of analysis along with an array of different methods. Furthermore, they were completed at various points in history, some with high political pressure.