Concepts Leading to a Sustainable Architecture for Cislunar Development

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is developing new capabilities for human and scientific exploration beyond Earth's orbit. This effort includes the Space Shuttle derived Space Launch System (SLS), the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) and the Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO). There are several requirements and Technical Performance Measures (TPMs) that have been levied by the Exploration Systems Development (ESD) upon the SLS, MPCV, and GSDO Programs including an integrated Launch Availability (LA) TPM. The LA TPM is used to drive into the SLS, Orion and GSDO designs a high confidence of successfully launching exploration missions that have narrow Earth departure windows. The LA TPM takes into consideration the reliability of the overall system (SLS, Orion and GSDO), natural environments, likelihood of a failure, and the time required to recover from an anomaly. A challenge with the LA TPM is the interrelationships between SLS, Orion, GSDO and the natural environments during launch countdown and launch delays that makes it impossible to develop an analytical solution for calculating the integrated launch probability. This paper provides an overview of how Discrete Event Simulation (DES) modeling was used to develop the LA TPM, how it was allocated down to the individual programs, and how the LA analysis is being used to inform and drive the SLS, Orion, and GSDO designs to ensure adequate launch availability for future human exploration.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration s (NASA) Space Launch System (SLS) Program, managed at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), is charged with delivering a new capability for human and scientific exploration beyond Earth orbit (BEO). The SLS may also provide backup crew and cargo services to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been training for long-duration voyages to destinations such as asteroids and Mars. For context, the SLS will be larger than the Saturn V, providing 10 percent more thrust at liftoff in its initial 70 metric ton (t) configuration and 20 percent more in its evolved 130-t configuration. The SLS Program knows that affordability is the key to sustainability. This paper will provide an overview of its operations strategy, which includes initiatives to reduce both development and fixed costs by using existing hardware and infrastructure assets to meet a first launch by 2017 within the projected budget. It also has a long-range plan to keep the budget flat using competitively selected advanced technologies that offer appropriate return on investment. To arrive at the launch vehicle concept, the SLS Program conducted internal engineering and business studies that have been externally validated by industry and reviewed by independent assessment panels. A series of design reference missions has informed the SLS operations concept, including launching the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) on an autonomous demonstration mission in a lunar flyby scenario in 2017, and the first flight of a crew on Orion for a lunar flyby in 2021. Additional concepts address the processing of very large payloads, using a series of modular fairings and adapters to flexibly configure the rocket for the mission. This paper will describe how the SLS, Orion, and Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO) programs are working together to create streamlined, affordable operations for sustainable exploration for decades to come.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) is directing efforts to build the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift rocket that will carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) and other important payloads far beyond Earth orbit (BEO). Its evolvable architecture will allow NASA to begin with Moon fly-bys and then go on to transport humans or robots to distant places such as asteroids and Mars. Designed to simplify spacecraft complexity, the SLS rocket will provide improved mass margins and radiation mitigation, and reduced mission durations. These capabilities offer attractive advantages for ambitious missions such as a Mars sample return, by reducing infrastructure requirements, cost, and schedule. For example, if an evolved expendable launch vehicle (EELV) were used for a proposed mission to investigate the Saturn system, a complicated trajectory would be required - with several gravity-assist planetary fly-bys - to achieve the necessary outbound velocity. The SLS rocket, using significantly higher characteristic energy (C3) energies, can more quickly and effectively take the mission directly to its destination, reducing trip time and cost. As this paper will report, the SLS rocket will launch payloads of unprecedented mass and volume, such as “monolithic” telescopes and in-space infrastructure. Thanks to its ability to co-manifest large payloads, it also can accomplish complex missions in fewer launches. Future analyses will include reviews of alternate mission concepts and detailed evaluations of SLS figures of merit, helping the new rocket revolutionize science mission planning and design for years to come.

This paper provides an overview of the tools used to conduct independent modeling and simulation of Artemis 1 separation events and highlights challenges and lessons learned across a decade of analysis. An overview of each of the tools along with the process flow and key components of maintaining independence from the Program’s baseline tool set will be provided. In addition, each of the separation analyses conducted will be discussed, making note of key models incorporated for each event and unique challenges that were addressed. The technical work described in this paper is part of an on-going technical assessment conducted by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center to develop and maintain an independent modeling and simulation capability in support of Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) throughout design, verification, and flight readiness cycles. For Artemis 1, an end-to-end analysis approach was taken with events simulated from launch to re-entry. This paper will focus on the separation events, including liftoff clearance analysis, solid rocket booster (SRB) separation from Core Stage (CS), Service Module (SM) panel jettison, ICPS / Core Stage Separation, and MPCV/ ICPS separation. To assess separation clearances, the NESC has developed a high fidelity, independent 6-degree of freedom (DOF) simulation of the separation events. The simulation was developed using the Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories II (POST2). POST2 is an industry standard flight trajectory optimization and simulation tool that is Class D compliant and follows NASA NPR 7150.2, which includes regression testing, unit testing, and configuration control of the simulation. The primary objective of the SLS separation and clearance analyses was to estimate the clearances between different vehicle components and/or ground support equipment (GSE) during separation events. The clearance is defined as the minimum distance from any point on one 3D geometry model associated with one vehicle component (or GSE) to any point on another 3D geometry model associated with a vehicle component separating from the main body. The vehicle geometry models used by the NESC to compute the separation clearances were derived from CAD models. POST2 simulation results were post processed in the Exploration Visualization Environment (EVE) tool to compute clearances, and detect recontact occurrences, if any, between the separating stages. EVE is a simulation, visualization, and analysis system designed to integrate time-based dynamics data with detailed graphical models in a full-scale virtual environment. EVE was used to simultaneously calculate more than 30 different separation clearances by “driving” detailed vehicle geometry models with position and attitude time history data obtained from the POST2 simulation. EVE displays each clearance distance visually, at any given instant of time, with a straight line connecting the two closest points on each object and records the time history of the clearance distance in a file. If the clearance reduces to zero, then EVE reports it as a recontact. To perform separation analyses, POST2 Monte Carlo analyses were performed by running 2000 dispersed cases that included over hundreds of uncertainties and dispersions for a range of simulation models including aerodynamics, propulsion, navigation sensors, control actuators, slosh and flexible body dynamics, and winds and atmosphere. Clearances were computed for each of the dispersed Monte Carlo trajectories and overall separation performance was statistically assessed. Over the past decade the POST2 simulation and EVE visualization tools have been used to perform detailed assessments of the separation events that occur during the Artemis 1 ascent. To support these assessments, numerous unique simulation models were developed and integrated into the standard suite of POST2 simulation models to address and resolve key concerns specific to each of the Artemis 1 separation events. In addition to presenting an overview of the multi-body 6-DOF simulation and separation analysis capability, the paper will discuss the integration of key simulation models such as flexible body dynamics, slosh dynamics, separation mechanisms, multi-body aerodynamics, and environmental models. Additional details are provided about other challenges that were addressed, including the use of a convex hull to reduce computational time for clearance calculations, the modeling of incidental recontact during separation events, and the capability to simulate failure scenarios.

Scientific exploration of the solar system has traditionally been the realm of large and expensive projects known as primary missions. These missions are usually costly, and they tend to have a long development cycle of massive spacecraft carrying scientific payloads. The maturation of mini- and micro-satellites over the past 40 years has allowed space science to be carried out in lower cost missions. In more recent years, the space community has started to consider using even nanosatellite platforms (such as CubeSats that are typically within a few tens of kilograms) for scientific endeavor in the solar system. Robotic exploration of the solar system using nanosatellites is attractive because of their lower cost, less stringent risk posture, and a shorter development schedule compared to traditional primary science missions. Therefore, it is beneficial to facilitate the development of nanosatellite technologies for deep space exploration by providing an opportunity for a largescale demonstration. Motivated by this, NASA is offering free space launch services on Space Launch System (SLS) to 13 deep space 6U CubeSats, as well as is providing the ground network support if the selected CubeSat missions ask for it. The CubeSats have been chosen competitively as secondary payloads on the SLS launch vehicle carrying the Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), which will be the first integrated flight test of NASA's Deep Space Exploration Systems including the Orion spacecraft, SLS rocket, and the newly upgraded Exploration Ground Systems at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL, USA. The 13 EM-1 CubeSats are currently going through the final stages of integration and testing to be ready for launch in late 2020. To help showcase the potential impact of the EM-1 CubeSats, this Special Issue within IEEE AEROSPACE AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS MAGAZINE (AESM) is organized to present their science objectives, development story, the challenges faced, and lessons learned by the development teams to share with the community. The three Editors of the Special Issue (SI) would like to thank all the authors from the EM-1 CubeSat teams who managed to make our publication schedule, as well as authors from the EM-1 primary mission team and DSN team. The Editors would also like to thank AESM for offering the publication opportunities to this SI and allowing our SI to come in three parts due to a large volume of papers we have to include. The Part 1 of the SI consists of five papers that are briefly introduced.

Science on the lunar surface facilitated by low latency telerobotics from a Lunar Orbital Platform - Gateway

A human mission to Mars has long been an exploration goal of the United States and the international community. To achieve this goal, NASA is developing the Orion crew capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) as key elements in the eventual architecture for the Evolvable Mars Campaign (EMC). Both elements are designed to advance human spaceflight beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the first time since the Apollo missions with the eventual goal of landing humans on Mars. This aggressive goal is complicated by the need to optimize the use of government resources during a period when budgets are challenged. Defining and prioritizing the technology and hardware needed is crucial to achieving the goal of landing humans on Mars. This paper will discuss potential near term missions that leverage Orion and SLS. A unique feature of the SLS/Orion system is supporting co-manifested payloads along with launching crews beyond LEO. Doing so provides new flexibility in achieving human exploration, operations, and science objectives on any given mission. Utilizing this co-manifest capability, a number of potential near term missions have been identified that will mature the elements needed for an eventual Mars mission, develop long duration mission operations techniques necessary for the Mars mission, refine life support systems, and conduct science investigations that were previously impractical. This paper will discuss a possible roadmap of missions that could be conducted over the next decade to place humans on the path to Mars.

In order to meet the space transportation needs for a new century, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has implemented an Integrated Space Transportation Plan to produce safe, economical, and reliable access to space. One near term objective of this initiative is the design and development of a next-generation vehicle and launch system that will transport crew and cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS), the Orbital Space Plane (OSP). The OSP system is composed of a manned launch vehicle by an existing Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). The OSP will provide emergency crew rescue from the ISS by 2008, and provide crew and limited cargo transfer to and from the ISS by 2012. A key requirement is for the OSP to be safer and more reliable than the Soyuz and Space Shuttle, which currently provide these capabilities.NASA has taken an integrated systems approach in designing the OSP launch system and related ground operations and launch support services. This “System-Centric” approach, as opposed to a “Vehicle-Centric” approach, presents unique challenges in terms of meeting the desired safety and reliability requirements As a result, NASA is utilizing PRA, a methodology for quantitative risk assessment, on the entire system during the design process and throughout the life of the system. When PRA is performed early in the design and development cycle with full engineering design and operations involvement, the PRA based integrated system model will provide a means for methodical and objective optimisation of the conceptual design.This paper discusses the development and implementation of PRA in the OSP Program. The OSP Program is the first major NASA program to perform and use PRA during the concept formulation phase of the program and is expected to produce the paradigm by which future space launch systems can be designed to meet successively higher safety and reliability demands [1].KeywordsInternational Space StationSpace ShuttleQuantitative Risk AssessmentProbabilistic Risk AssessmentIntegrate System ModelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The CubeSat form factor of nano-satellite (a satellite with a mass between one and ten kilograms), has grown in popularity due to its ease of construction and low development and launch costs. In particular, its use as a student-led payload design project has increased due to the growing number of launch opportunities. Increasingly, CubeSats are deployed as secondary or tertiary payloads on U.S. commercial launch vehicles or from the International Space Station (ISS). The focus of this study will be on CubeSats launched from the ISS.

Exciting and robust human and robotic exploration missions will be enabled by the NASA Space Launch System (SLS). The SLS's capabilities for launching heavy payloads with large diameters (up to 10 meters) will enable a variety of science rich missions including Mars and outer planet missions; including Human missions utilizing the Orion Crew Vehicle. Missions to cislunar destinations will serve as proving grounds for later Crewed Mars Missions in the 2030s. In this report an outline is given of the capabilities of the SLS, strategies for exploration missions are presented, and descriptions of SLS based payload elements are given. The SLS program is making progress toward delivering a new capability for Beyond Earth Orbit exploration.

The International Space Station National Laboratory gives students a platform to conduct space-flight science experiments. To successfully take advantage of this opportunity, students and their mentors must have an understanding of how to develop and then conduct a science project on international space station within a school year. Many factors influence the speed in which a project progresses. The first step is to develop a science plan, including defining a hypothesis, developing science objectives, and defining a concept of operation for conducting the flight experiment. The next step is to translate the plan into well-defined requirements for payload development. The last step is a rapid development process. Included in this step is identifying problems early and negotiating appropriate trade-offs between science and implementation complexity. Organizing the team and keeping players motivated is an equally important task, as is employing the right mentors. The project team must understand the flight experiment infrastructure, which includes the international space station environment, payload resource requirements and available components, fail-safe operations, system logs, and payload data. Without this understanding, project development can be impacted, resulting in schedule delays, added costs, undiagnosed problems, and data misinterpretation. The information and processes for conducting low-cost, rapidly developed student-based international space station experiments are presented, including insight into the system operations, the development environment, effective team organization, and data analysis. The details are based on the Valley Christian Schools (VCS, San Jose, CA) fluidic density experiment and penicillin experiment, which were developed by 13- and 14-year-old students and flown on ISS.

The XVth International Conference on Calorimetry in High Energy Physics, CALOR2012, was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 4–8 June 2012. The series of conferences on calorimetry started in 1990 at Fermilab, and they have been the premier event for calorimeter aficionados, a trend that CALOR2012 upheld. This year, several presentations focused on the status of the major calorimeter systems, especially at the LHC. Discussions on new and developing techniques in calorimetry took a full day. Excellent updates on uses of calorimeters or about ideas that are deeply rooted in particle physics calorimetry in astrophysics and neutrino physics were followed by talks on algorithms and special triggers that rely on calorimeters. Finally, discussions of promising current developments and ongoing R&D work for future calorimeters capped the conference. The field of calorimetry is alive and well, as evidenced by the more than 100 attendees and the excellent quality of over 80 presentations. You will find the written contributions in this volume. The presentations can be found at calor2012.ttu.edu.

The establishment of sustained human presence on the Moon for science and exploration combines the design, integration, and operation challenges experienced from both the short Apollo lunar missions and the build-up and sustained crew operations of the International Space Station (ISS). With the goal of establishing a lunar Outpost on the Moon to extend human presence, pursue scientific activities, use the Moon to prepare for future human missions to Mars, and expand Earth’s economic sphere, a change in how both the Apollo and ISS Programs were planned and executed is required for this new international lunar exploration program. Since the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) was released in 2004, NASA, in conjunction with international space agencies, industry, and academia, has continued to define and refine plans for sustained and affordable robotic and human exploration of the Moon and beyond. One area NASA is developing that can significantly change how systems required for sustained human presence are designed and integrated, as well as potentially break our reliance on Earth supplied logistics, is In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). ISRU, also known “living off the land”, involves the extraction and processing of local resources into useful products. In particular, the ability to make propellants, life support consumables, fuel cell reagents, and radiation shielding can significantly reduce the cost, mass, and risk of sustained human activities beyond Earth. The ability to modify the lunar landscape for safer landing, transfer of payloads from the lander to an outpost, dust generation mitigation, and infrastructure placement and buildup are also extremely important for longterm lunar operations. Because ISRU hardware and systems have never been demonstrated before, NASA is examining how these capabilities can be added into mission designs and plans such that lunar mission success is currently not relying on these capabilities, but that the systems developed are flexible enough to incorporate the capabilities once they have been demonstrated. With this in mind, the ISRU Project within the Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) has initiated development and testing of hardware and systems in three main focus areas: (1) Regolith Excavation, Handling and Material Transportation; (2) Oxygen Extraction from Regolith; and (3) ISRU Precursor Activities. To minimize cost and ensure that ISRU technologies, systems, and functions are integrated properly into the Outpost, technology development efforts are being coordinated with other ETDP development areas such as Surface Mobility, Surface Power, Life Support, EVA, and Propulsion, as well as outside government agencies, industry, academia, and International Partners to the maximum extent possible to leverage funding and increase commonality of hardware at the Outpost. Lastly, laboratory and field system-level tests and demonstrations will be performed as often as possible to demonstrate improvements in: Capabilities (ex. 1 ISRU Project Manager for ETDP, EP, and AIAA Member 2 Chief, Applied Science Division, KT-D-2, and AIAA Member 3 ISRU Lead for Excavation, MS 77-5, and AIAA Member 4 Deputy for ISRU Development Support, VP33, and AIAA Member AIAA SPACE 2008 Conference & Exposition 9 11 September 2008, San Diego, California AIAA 2008-7853 Copyright © 2008 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. The U.S. Government has a royalty-free license to exercise all rights under the copyright claimed herein for Governmental purposes. All other rights are reserved by the copyright owner. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 2 digging deeper); Performance (ex. lower power); and Duration (ex. more autonomy or more robustness), as well as form the partnerships with industry and International Partners that will be needed once actual Outpost flight hardware development and deployment begins. This paper will provide the status of work performed to date within the NASA ISRU Project with respect to technology and system development and field demonstration activities, as well as the current strategy to implement ISRU in future robotic and human lunar exploration missions.

The current version of NASA standards for manned spaceflight hardware do not contain sufficient detail for the certification of additively manufactured components. The development of additively manufactured standards is currently in work by several standards organizations. However, NASA cannot wait on these organizations to develop such standards. NASA and its program partners in manned spaceflight (Commercial Crew, Space Launch System and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) are actively developing additively manufactured components for flight as early as 2019.

Drogue parachute damping is required to dampen the Orion Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) crew module (CM) oscillations prior to deployment of the main parachutes. During the Apollo program, drogue parachute damping was modeled on the premise that the drogue parachute force vector aligns with the resultant velocity of the parachute attach point on the CM. Equivalent Cm(sub q) and Cm(sub alpha) equations for drogue parachute damping resulting from the Apollo legacy parachute damping model premise have recently been developed. The MPCV computer simulations ANTARES and Osiris have implemented high fidelity two-body parachute damping models. However, high-fidelity model-based damping motion predictions do not match the damping observed during wind tunnel and full-scale free-flight oscillatory motion. This paper will present the methodology for comparing and contrasting the Apollo legacy parachute damping model with full-scale free-flight oscillatory motion. The analysis shows an agreement between the Apollo legacy parachute damping model and full-scale free-flight oscillatory motion.