Friday 31 July 2009

Space Exploration Architecture

Conjectures on the mission architecture that could be used for human exploration of the solar system over the coming decades.

Whatever options are chosen for human mission scenarios, they need to be cost effective. The world can only afford to divert a finite fraction of it’s resources towards space exploration, especially in the current economic melt down.

Space missions need to be relatively safe. I say relatively, because many people feel that present day mission planning, compared to the 1960’s, has become far to risk averse.

Finally, another desirable aspect would be that missions leave a building block for future endeavours to build upon. This might be either the design of a ship or station segment that can be reused, or the hardware itself can be reused.

However, the real benefit of this stance must always be scrutinised. It’s a nice idea that modules used to build a moon-base could also be used on Mars, but the environments are really quite different. Many believe that going back to the moon will not actually be good preparation and training for going to Mars, but just an unnecessary distraction.

So the following articles are some ideas of the projects that might comprise an overall strategy for exploring the solar system.