Logistics Rates and Assumptions for Future Human Spaceflight Missions Beyond LEO

As NASA prepares for future human spaceflight missions with extended crew duration in destinations beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), the Agency has focused itself on understanding the drivers to sustainably support human life beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Future missions to deep space, the lunar surface, and eventually the Martian surface pose new challenges in ensuring the crew is sufficiently supplied with all necessary materials. To mitigate the risk of not delivering sufficient consumables and logistics for human spaceflight missions, NASA has examined past human space mission data and developed metabolic modeling to determine estimates for the crew consumption rates of fluids, solid consumables, and additional equipment needed. This paper is a compilation of guidelines, rates, and assumptions necessary to evaluate the logistics needs for future human exploration conceptual missions beyond LEO, providing a starting point and resource of information regarding usage rates and overall logistics supply planning for crewed exploration missions. Logistics represent all equipment and supplies not installed as part of the vehicle that are needed to support mission activities. Logistics can be further divided into specific categories, including consumables, maintenance items, spares, utilization, outfitting, as well as any packaging required. This paper will also provide use case examples of logistics needs to support human missions in deep space, including a conceptual lunar surface mission. The paper provides information necessary to calculate the mass and volume of known logistics for conceptual future human exploration missions beyond LEO. The assumptions in the paper are updated versions of previous assumptions made by the Agency and were derived from a number of sources, including International Space Station (ISS) historical usage and resupply rates, the Life Support Baseline Values and Assumptions Document (BVAD) 2022, Human Integration Design Handbook (HIDH) 2014, and data gathered from NASA human spaceflight programs and projects. The primary goal of the paper is to establish a set of consistent reference rates that multiple teams and groups can utilize to conduct logistics analysis and compare cases. This methodology is for initial estimates of conceptual human missions and does not take the place of detailed analysis for programs, nor does it provide requirements for programs.