Analysis of Alternative Architectures for Cargo Lunar Landers

NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program has been working with commercial partners to develop human-class lunar landers to return the first American woman and next American man to the lunar surface in the mid 2020’s. In an effort to expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit, NASA’s Artemis program aims to facilitate a sustainable, long-term human presence in cis-lunar space. A component of this will require significant infrastructure to be delivered to the lunar surface. Delivering this infrastructure will require a significant lander capability that has yet to be developed. A thorough understanding of cargo lunar lander architectures is required such that select alternatives can be identified that best support the Artemis program’s objective of sustainability. The goal of this study is to aid NASA and its partners in the understanding of the cargo lunar lander trades space, as well as identify potential robust alternatives. The results will support NASA as it moves forward with key activities such as requirements formulation, agency strategic planning, and potential cargo lunar lander procurements. The study builds off of recent work performed by the Human Landing System program’s Architecture and Systems Analysis group to encompass a broad trade space of cargo lunar lander architecture alternatives. The current trade space as depicted by the morphological matrix and mission graph in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, respectively, includes key alternative options that have become highly relevant due to current HLS activities and include on-orbit refueling, active cryogenic fluid management, Earth orbit aggregation, and global lunar access. The authors believe that there is also a statistically relevant impact of lander-payload configuration on the primary structure of the vehicle that could greatly impact alternative selection. Because of this, several conceptual lander-payload configurations will be evaluated to determine the level of impact. The current set of conceptual configurations are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. To aid the conceptual evaluation of these configurations, a catalogue of notional payloads has been developed that represent a wide range of masses and volumes that are expected to be delivered in support of a sustained human lunar presence, including pressurized and unpressurized rovers, surface habitats, power systems, and other support infrastructure. In order to execute this study in a timely fashion, a similar approach to that utilized in a simil