Cost Optimized Logistics for Commercial Operations in Low Earth Orbit and Cislunar Space

Abstract

Designing profitable mission and logistics architectures is necessary to establish a profitable commercial market and support a robust space economy. It is the goal of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to establish such an economy in low Earth orbit (LEO) through the implementation of commercial LEO destinations and to commission self-sustaining lunar infrastructure through the Artemis missions. The ISS and the Apollo lunar landers demonstrated the ability to provide safe and reliable habitation, but the cost to support these missions has been on the order of billions of United States Dollars (USD). Minimizing the operational costs of commercial space systems will be required if commercial companies expect to generate a profit from their services. To address this, this thesis derives and demonstrates a manual cost optimization method for space system mission architectures, with respect to logistical and system design. In tandem, a computational tool called the Cost model for Space system Operations (COST-O) was developed. The demonstration included the iteration of a logistics and system design vector for two cases: a commercial LEO space station, and a commercial lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) liquid oxygen generation system. These mission architectures were modelled and simulated in SpaceNet which first analyzed for feasibility and then were processed by COST-O. This data was used to make financial forecasts and were analyzed for cost sensitivity. The results suggest that for a commercial LEO space station, a closed loop ECLSS, large stockpile of resources, reduced resupply cadence, and a combination of tourists and visiting crew would be a profitable architecture at the crew capacity of at least three paying customers present on the station per day with an annual operational cost of 1,129,731,710 USD. Profits would be achieved by the end of ten years of steady state operations at the current market price of 3.12 million USD per crew member per day. Attempts to minimize this cost should first be made in the cadence of funded astronaut technician flights, as crew launches contribute most to the overall operational cost. Future work should address ways to minimize this, such as reducing the required amount of astronaut technicians that must be present at any given time. For a commercial lunar ISRU liquid oxygen generation system, an architecture supporting a closed loop system, using Starship as the launch and landing vehicle, a prepositioned stockpile of resources at the lunar surface, and a hydrogen reduction agent is most cost optimal, with an annual operating cost of 19,275,486,559 USD, and profitability achieved at the design rate of twenty metric tons of liquid oxygen produced and sold per year. At the current market price of 1.2 million USD per kilogram, the system would be profitable by the end of the first year of steady state operations. Attempts to minimize this operational cost further should improve the recyclability of the system. Future work should evaluate added robustness to the architecture by delivering multiple systems and should model deliberate cargo packing decisions.