Multidisciplinary Design and Architecture Optimization of a Reusable Lunar Lander

Abstract

With renewed interest in lunar exploration and the upcoming deployment of the lunar space station, the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G), a scientific community, is focusing on the design of a lander to bring people back to the lunar surface. This work focuses on optimizing two aspects of the lunar lander concurrently: the mission architecture and the vehicle design, often treated independently in the literature. A methodology is introduced to enumerate and preliminarily rank all possible mission architectures. The best mission architectures are then coupled with a multidisciplinary design optimization process by modeling the various components of the spacecraft and optimizing over a set of design parameters. The need for fast computational models, particularly in trajectory optimization, resulted in an analytical approximation of gravitational losses. This work resulted in a hierarchy of mission architectures that are ranked according to the average mass necessary to perform the mission. This work is intended to help a system engineer designing a lunar lander in choosing the best number of vehicles, the number of reuses, and the mission profile for his/her mission requirements.