Sending a human into space and doing it efficiently presents a galaxy of challenges. Koki Ho, University of Illinois assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, and his graduate students, Hao Chen and Bindu Jagannatha, explored ways to integrate the logistics of space travel by looking at a campaign of lunar missions, spacecraft design, and creating a framework to optimize fuel and other resources.
Ho said it's about finding a balance between time and the amount of fuel -- getting there fast requires more fuel. If time isn't an issue, slow but efficient low-thrust propulsion might be a better choice. Taking advantage of this classical tradeoff, Ho noted that there are opportunities to minimize the launch mass and cost when looking at the problems from a campaign perspective -- multiple launches/flights.
"Our goal is to make space travel efficient," Ho said. "One way to do that is to consider campaign designs, that is, multiple missions together -- not just launching everything from the ground for every mission like Apollo did. In a multi-mission campaign, previous missions are leveraged for subsequent missions. So if a previous mission deployed some infrastructure, such as a propellant depot, or if work had begun to mine oxygen from soil on the moon, those are used in the design of the next mission."
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