Applied Space Architecture: Advanced Constructive Design or How to Bring Space Down to Earth so We Can Keep Sending Mankind to the Stars
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space modulars↗
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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Lessons Learned from the Development and Implementation of the Atmosphere Resource Recovery and Environmental Monitoring Project
The Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Program's Atmosphere Resource Recovery and Environmental Monitoring (ARREM) Project have been developing atmosphere revitalization and environmental monitoring subsystem architectures suitable for enabling sustained crewed exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). Using the International Space Station state-of-the-art (SOA) as the technical basis, the ARREM Project has contributed to technical advances that improve affordability, reliability, and functional efficiency while reducing dependence on a ground-based logistics resupply model. Functional demonstrations have merged new process technologies and concepts with existing ISS developmental hardware and operate them in a controlled environment simulating various crew metabolic loads. The ARREM Project's strengths include access to a full complement of existing developmental hardware that perform all the core atmosphere revitalization functions, unique testing facilities to evaluate subsystem performance, and a coordinated partnering effort among six NASA field centers and industry partners to provide the innovative expertise necessary to succeed. A project overview is provided and the project management strategies that have enabled a multidiscipinary engineering team to work efficiently across project, NASA field center, and industry boundaries to achieve the project's technical goals are discussed. Lessons learned and best practices relating to the project are presented and discussed.
Roman, Monsi C.↗
Marshall Space Flight Center Research and Technology Report 2019
Today, our calling to explore is greater than ever before, and here at Marshall Space Flight Center—we make human deep space exploration possible. A key goal for Artemis is demonstrating and perfecting capabilities on the Moon for technologies needed for humans to get to Mars. This year’s report features 10 of the Agency’s 16 Technology Areas, and I am proud of Marshall’s role in creating solutions for so many of these daunting technical challenges. Many of these projects will lead to sustainable in-space architecture for human space exploration that will allow us to travel to the Moon, on to Mars, and beyond. Others are developing new scientific instruments capable of providing an unprecedented glimpse into our universe. NASA has led the charge in space exploration for more than six decades, and through the Artemis program we will help build on our work in low Earth orbit and pave the way to the Moon and Mars. At Marshall, we leverage the skills and interest of the international community to conduct scientific research, develop and demonstrate technology, and train international crews to operate further from Earth for longer periods of time than ever before— first at the lunar surface, then on to our next giant leap, human exploration of Mars. While each project in this report seeks to advance new technology and challenge conventions, it is important to recognize the diversity of activities and people supporting our mission. This report not only showcases the Center’s capabilities and our partnerships, it also highlights the progress our people have achieved in the past year. These scientists, researchers and innovators are why Marshall and NASA will continue to be a leader in innovation, exploration, and discovery for years to come.
Dankanich, John W.↗
Lunar Habitation Science Opportunities and Constraints
NASA and its international and commercial partners are assessing new habitation concepts for Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars. The functional needs of such habitats will increase as missions progress across the Human Lunar Return (HLR), Foundational Exploration (FE) and Sustained Lunar Evolution (SLE) architectural segments. These increasing needs will be met with scalable increases in volume, power, and larger crew sizes over longer mission durations which will provide numerous scientific and exploration opportunities.
Science↗
Approach to an Affordable and Sustainable Space Transportation System
This paper describes an approach and a general procedure for creating space transportation architectural concepts that are at once affordable and sustainable. Previous papers by the authors and other members of the Space Propulsion Synergy Team (SPST) focused on a functional system breakdown structure for an architecture and definition of high-payoff design techniques with a technology integration strategy. This paper follows up by using a structured process that derives architectural solutions focused on achieving life cycle affordability and sustainability. Further, the paper includes an example concept that integrates key design techniques discussed in previous papers. !
McCleskey, Caey M.↗
Habitability: CAMELOT 4
During 1988 to 1989 the NASA/USRA Advanced Design Program sponsored research and design efforts aimed at developing habitability criteria and at defining a habitability concept as a useful tool in understanding and evaluating dwellings for prolonged stays in extraterrestrial space. The Circulating Auto sufficient Mars-Earth Luxurious Orbital Transport (CAMELOT) was studied as a case in which the students would try to enhance the quality of life of the inhabitants by applying architectural design methodology. The study proposed 14 habitability criteria considered necessary to fulfill the defined habitability concept, which is that state of equilibrium that results from the interaction between components of the Individual Architecture Mission Complex, which allows a person to sustain physiological homeostatis, adequate performance, and acceptable social relationships. Architecture, design development, refinements and revisions to improve the quality of life, new insights on artificial gravity, form and constitution problems, and the final design concept are covered.
Alequin, W.↗
Lunar COTS: An Economical and Sustainable Approach to Reaching Mars
The NASA COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) Program was a very successful program that developed and demonstrated cost-effective development and acquisition of commercial cargo transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS). The COTS acquisition strategy utilized a newer model than normally accepted in traditional procurement practices. This new model used Space Act Agreements where NASA entered into partnerships with industry to jointly share cost, development and operational risks to demonstrate new capabilities for mutual benefit. This model proved to be very beneficial to both NASA and its industry partners as NASA saved significantly in development and operational costs while industry partners successfully expanded their market share of the global launch transportation business. The authors, who contributed to the development of the COTS model, would like to extend this model to a lunar commercial services program that will push development of technologies and capabilities that will serve a Mars architecture and lead to an economical and sustainable pathway to transporting humans to Mars. Over the past few decades, several architectures for the Moon and Mars have been proposed and studied but ultimately halted or not even started due to the projected costs significantly exceeding NASA's budgets. Therefore a new strategy is needed that will fit within NASA's projected budgets and takes advantage of the US commercial industry along with its creative and entrepreneurial attributes. The authors propose a new COTS-like program to enter into partnerships with industry to demonstrate cost-effective, cis-lunar commercial services, such as lunar transportation, lunar ISRU operations, and cis-lunar propellant depots that can enable an economical and sustainable Mars architecture. Similar to the original COTS program, the goals of the proposed program, being notionally referred to as Lunar Commercial Orbital Transfer Services (LCOTS) program will be to: 1) reduce development and operational costs by sharing costs with industry; 2) create new markets in cis-lunar space to further reduce operational costs; and 3) enable NASA to develop an affordable and economical exploration Mars architecture. The paper will describe a plan for a proposed LCOTS program, its potential impact to an eventual Mars architecture and its many benefits to NASA, commercial space industry and the US economy.
Lunar ISRU↗
NASA’s Communications and Navigation Architecture Plans to Support the Return to the Moon and A Sustainable Lunar Presence
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
lunar communications↗
Surface Systems Capability Gaps for Enabling NASA’s Sustainable Lunar Operations
This paper discusses the NASA Ground, Test, and Surface Systems Taxonomy (TX-13) related capability gaps, including details of architecture, technology, engineering, and policy gaps for enabling sustainable lunar surface operations and subsequent Mars missions. Architecture gaps include standardized architectures and interfaces, multi-element systems engineering and integration, design for supportability, and nuclear payload processing and launch approach. Technology gaps, primarily focused on uncrewed surface operations, include automated/autonomous cryogenic loading, transfer, servicing, and storage of commodities; health determination and fault management; automated/autonomous planning and scheduling; automated/autonomous inspection, maintenance and repair; logistics management and reliability; launch and landing site preparation; commodity management; and advanced umbilicals and dust tolerant interfaces. Engineering gaps include high-purity propellant production for ground and surface applications and large-scale xenon servicing capabilities. The policy gap includes nuclear propulsion acceptance testing and qualification approach. Strategically identifying human/automation roles and tasks and infusing automation and autonomy practices early in a system’s lifecycle is essential for achieving the mission objectives for a sustainable human lunar presence, improving performance and mission effectiveness, reducing operations costs and reliance on humans to perform tasks, and accommodating ground communication delays.
Surface Systems↗
Solid-State Architecture Batteries for Enhanced Rechargeability and Safety (SABERS): Advanced Battery Technology for Sustainable Aviation
All-electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOL) for urban air mobility (UAM) concepts face numerous challenging technical barriers before their introduction into the consumer marketplace. The primary barrier to overcome is developing an energy storage system capable of meeting the rigorous aerospace safety and performance criteria. The performance metrics for eVTOL vehicles are at least two times greater than those of electric ground vehicles. Furthermore, inherently non-flammable batteries are essential for safe operation of commercial electric aerovehicles. The SABERS concept proposes a battery that meets the key performance criteria through development of a solid-state architecture battery utilizing high-capacity sulfur-selenium cathode and lithium metal anode. The combination of sulfur and selenium offers a balanced energy-to-power density ratio, which can be tailored to the specific application by altering the stoichiometric ratios of sulfur to selenium. This hybrid cathode will be developed by implementing NASA patented holey graphene technology as a highly conductive, ultra-lightweight electrode scaffold. A solid-state electrolyte will be used as a safe, non-flammable replacement to the highly flammable liquid organic electrolytes currently used in SOA lithium-ion batteries. This solid-state lithium-sulfur/selenium cell will be designed into a serial stacking configuration to enable dense packaging of the battery cells. The serial stacking configuration is termed a bipolar stack, which has the advantages of reducing overall cell weight, simplifying the interfaced connections for the cell, and minimizing the cooling requirements. Lastly, optimization of battery components will occur through a robust and rigorous combination of various computational modeling techniques covering multiple length scales. The expected result will be a fully solid-state battery with operational temperatures up to 150 °C which provides the required energy density, discharge rates, and inherent safety to meet the strict aerospace mission performance criteria. This presentation will demonstrate a feasible path for solid-state cells that possess a specific energy of greater than 400 Wh/kg to enable electric aircraft. The presentation will also explore novel materials and computational models used to achieve all solid-state cells that operate safely at very high temperatures and specific energies. The cells can withstand damage while operating without an increase in temperature or spontaneous ignition.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Vehicles↗
Building an Economical and Sustainable Lunar Infrastructure to Enable Lunar Industrialization
A new concept study was initiated to examine the architecture needed to gradually develop an economical, evolvable and sustainable lunar infrastructure using a public/private partnerships approach. This approach would establish partnership agreements between NASA and industry teams to develop a lunar infrastructure system that would be mutually beneficial. This approach would also require NASA and its industry partners to share costs in the development phase and then transfer operation of these infrastructure services back to its industry owners in the execution phase. These infrastructure services may include but are not limited to the following: lunar cargo transportation, power stations, communication towers and satellites, autonomous rover operations, landing pads and resource extraction operations. The public/private partnerships approach used in this study leveraged best practices from NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program which introduced an innovative and economical approach for partnering with industry to develop commercial cargo services to the International Space Station. This program was planned together with the ISS Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contracts which was responsible for initiating commercial cargo delivery services to the ISS for the first time. The public/private partnerships approach undertaken in the COTS program proved to be very successful in dramatically reducing development costs for these ISS cargo delivery services as well as substantially reducing operational costs. To continue on this successful path towards installing economical infrastructure services for LEO and beyond, this new study, named Lunar COTS (Commercial Operations and Transport Services), was conducted to examine extending the NASA COTS model to cis-lunar space and the lunar surface. The goals of the Lunar COTS concept are to: 1) develop and demonstrate affordable and commercial cis-lunar and surface capabilities, such as lunar cargo delivery and surface power generation, in partnership with industry; 2) incentivize industry to establish economical and sustainable lunar infrastructure services to support NASA missions and initiate lunar commerce; and 3) encourage creation of new space markets for economic growth and benefit. A phased-development approach was also studied to allow for incremental development and demonstration of capabilities needed to build a lunar infrastructure. This paper will describe the Lunar COTS concept goals, objectives and approach for building an economical and sustainable lunar infrastructure. It will also describe the technical challenges and advantages of developing and operating each infrastructure element. It will also describe the potential benefits and progress that can be accomplished in the initial phase of this Lunar COTS approach. Finally, the paper will also look forward to the potential of a robust lunar industrialization environment and its potential effect on the next 50 years of space exploration.
Zuniga, Allison F.↗
Technology Assessment in Support of the Presidential Vision for Space Exploration
This paper discusses the process and results of technology assessment in support of the United States Vision for Space Exploration of the Moon, Mars and Beyond. The paper begins by reviewing the Presidential Vision: a major endeavor in building systems of systems. It discusses why we wish to return to the Moon, and the exploration architecture for getting there safely, sustaining a presence, and safely returning. Next, a methodology for optimal technology investment is proposed with discussion of inputs including a capability hierarchy, mission importance weightings, available resource profiles as a function of time, likelihoods of development success, and an objective function. A temporal optimization formulation is offered, and the investment recommendations presented along with sensitivity analyses. Key questions addressed are sensitivity of budget allocations to cost uncertainties, reduction in available budget levels, and shifting funding within constraints imposed by mission timeline.
technology↗
Low-Latency Teleoperations: Operational Implications for Human Space Exploration
Low-latency teleoperations (LLT) is envisioned to be an element of human exploration missions in a number of different applications. LLT can be broadly considered to encompass any remote operation of an asset with a communication delay that is less than the human response time to allow for what is effectively "real-time" or "near real-time" operations. This paper will explore motivations and operational implications for why and how LLT might be used for human exploration space missions. LLT analyses have been performed under the auspices of the NASA Human Spaceflight Architecture Team (HAT) and Evolvable Mars Campaign (EMC). The EMC created a flexible, evolvable, capability-driven architectural strategy to enable a sustainable long-term human presence at Mars. LLT is envisioned to be part of that strategy for both in-space and on-surface applications, and this paper will expand on operational considerations within that broader strategic context, as well additional contexts. Some operational implications explored in this paper, derived largely from previous work, are: (1) crew mission support, for which we will address roles for Mission Control on earth, balanced with the capability for crew and robotic assets to operate independently, (2) science operations, with a focus on "backroom" support, highly dynamic science, and enhanced science return and efficiency, and (3) operational efficiency at a deep-space destination such as Mars, including implications for communications infrastructures and how to leverage and balance system autonomy with crew operations, both of which can inform the overall operational "choreography" between crew members, multiple shifts, and exploration assets.
human spaceflight↗
Trajectory Design Considerations for Lunar Surface to Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit Rendezvous
NASA’s Artemis program plans to use a 9:2 resonant southward Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) at the Earth-Moon’s L2 libration point to stage assets for a sustained lunar exploration campaign. This architecture includes the use of the Gateway space station positioned in this orbit. While the proximity operations in the NRHO are similar to field-free space dynamics, the far-field rendezvous aspect of the problem is more complicated. We analyze the key drivers of the ΔV performance of the far-field rendezvous problem from low lunar orbit to the Gateway. We find that lunar latitudinal libration is a driving factor to ΔV performance for surface ascent missions that rendezvous with the NRHO, and that transfer time from low lunar orbit to NRHO affects more aspects of the geometry and performance than expected from rendezvous in Keplerian orbits.
NRHO↗
Autonomous RPOD for Arbitrarily Configured Spacecraft with Anomaly Detection
Autonomous GN&C is a necessary component for a sustainable deep-space logistics architecture. The challenges for establishing robust autonomy are numerous, from state uncertainty, to anomaly detection and recovery. In this work, previous work investigating autonomous GN&C for arbitrary thruster configurations and mass properties is expanded to include state uncertainty and anomaly detection. Logistics vehicles with off-center-of-mass thruster configurations and in the presence of large but realistic state uncertainties are simulated in a Rendezvous, Proximity Operations and Docking scenario. Furthermore, stuck and non-functional thrusters are simulated, demonstrating the vehicle's ability to identify and overcome thruster anomalies. The simulations demonstrate that even with these realistic ambiguities, the vehicle is able to converge to the desired pose.
GN&C↗
Surface Systems Capability Gaps for Enabling NASA’s Sustainable Lunar Operations
This presentation discusses the NASA Ground, Test, and Surface Systems Taxonomy (TX-13) related capability gaps, including details of architecture, technology, engineering, and policy gaps for enabling sustainable lunar surface operations and subsequent Mars missions.
Surface Systems↗
Evaluation of Cache-based Superscalar and Cacheless Vector Architectures for Scientific Computations
The growing gap between sustained and peak performance for scientific applications has become a well-known problem in high performance computing. The recent development of parallel vector systems offers the potential to bridge this gap for a significant number of computational science codes and deliver a substantial increase in computing capabilities. This paper examines the intranode performance of the NEC SX6 vector processor and the cache-based IBM Power3/4 superscalar architectures across a number of key scientific computing areas. First, we present the performance of a microbenchmark suite that examines a full spectrum of low-level machine characteristics. Next, we study the behavior of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks using some simple optimizations. Finally, we evaluate the perfor- mance of several numerical codes from key scientific computing domains. Overall results demonstrate that the SX6 achieves high performance on a large fraction of our application suite and in many cases significantly outperforms the RISC-based architectures. However, certain classes of applications are not easily amenable to vectorization and would likely require extensive reengineering of both algorithm and implementation to utilize the SX6 effectively.
Oliker, Leonid↗
OR-AGENT framework – Architecting electrified heavy-duty drayage applications
The widespread adoption of zero-emission vehicles in heavy-duty (HD) commercial freight transportation faces considerable technoeconomic challenges. For heavy-duty trucks, ensuring high uptime, cost parity with diesel, and safety standards is especially critical as these vehicles operate over long distances with heavy loads, where any downtime or off-nominal behaviors significantly impacts logistics, productivity, and the total cost of ownership. Unlike traditional diesel refueling, BEV charging infrastructure must be co-optimized with vehicle deployment, operational demands, and grid capacity to ensure cost-effective and reliable freight operations. However, the lack of a standardized ownership and service model has led to a fragmented approach—where commercial vehicle operators may invest in, own, and maintain both vehicle/batteries and charging/energy infrastructure. This disconnect may exclude energy service providers from the equation, forcing fleet operators to explore ‘behind-the-fence’ energy solutions that increase capital investment, operational downtime, overhead costs, and, in some cases, net carbon emissions. To address these issues, this study introduces OR-AGENT (Optimal Regional Architecture Generation for Efficient National Transport), a comprehensive modeling framework that integrates powertrain architectures, charging infrastructures, and energy backbone systems into a cohesive strategy. In this paper, OR-AGENT is applied to develop an interconnected systems architecture for energy efficiency and resiliency enhancement of heavy-duty drayage vehicles at the Port of Savannah, GA. This framework showcases an interconnected systems approach to electrifying heavy-duty drayage vehicles at the Port of Savannah, GA. The study assessed BEVs with 400–1200 kWh battery capacities, accounting for seasonal variations in weather and freight routing. A diverse charging mix (150 kW–1250 kW) was evaluated alongside grid capacity constraints, cost, and carbon intensity analysis, leading to the development of a strategic microgrid/Distributed Energy Resources (DER) deployment architecture to ensure a reliable and sustainable transition. However, the findings also highlight the need for alternative zero-emission solutions for remaining trips, such as larger batteries, electrified roadways, hydrogen powertrains, or net-zero emission fuels. In conclusion, the findings are incorporated into a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model to identify optimal architectures for an interconnected electrified ecosystem.
Commercial vehicles↗