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Industrial-Scale Lunar Propellant Driven Interplanetary Mission Architectures

Presented by:

Nicholas James Bennett

Nicholas J. Bennett

ACSER, UNSW

 

Andrew G. Dempster

ACSER, UNSW

 

Serkan Saydam

ACSER, UNSW

 

We stand at the threshold of radically reduced cost to launch into Earth orbits. Although there are other players, the SpaceX Mars Project (1,000 Starships to Mars every synodic period) is the driver for their low launch costs and embodies demand for nearly half a million tons of oxygen in low Earth orbit (LEO) annually. Low launch costs could make Space-Based Solar Power viable, creating another large demand for propellant in LEO. Much in-situ resource utilization (ISRU)/Space Resources work is focused on small-scale proofs of concept, demonstrators, or science support. Here we use two exemplars to explore interplanetary mission architectures driven by industrial-scale lunar propellant: the Mars Project, and a human Jupiter system explorer. Our 2021 COSPAR presentation demonstrated that the value a lunar propellant operation can recover increases with the energy of the delivery orbit, and that delivering oxidizer in geostationary transit orbit (GTO) yields high value and high production output utilization. The Mars Project leverages both effects, Human Jupiter just the former. In both architectures, we incrementally pump marshalling orbits from LEO to highly elliptical Earth orbits. This increases recoverable value and interplanetary vehicle payload to propellant ratio at injection. A Starship in GTO can inject 4x cargo vs one in LEO, together with lunar oxidizer this eliminates 75% of trans-Mars Starships and at Mars return propellant manufacturing, 60% of rendezvous, and 90% of tanker launches. The architecture simultaneously lowers consumer costs and the barriers to lunar propellant. During the boost to GTO, Human Jupiter is a customer for impulse generated by lunar hydrolox, and subsequently for Jupiter injection hydrolox. Surprisingly, for the return from Jupiter low delta-v and likely H2O propellant ISRU both favour hydrolox over hydrogen nuclear thermal rockets for the exploration vehicle. Industrial-scale lunar propellants could well reshape interplanetary mission architectures.

Category:

Space resource utilisation and space mining

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