Multidisciplinary Design and Architecture Optimization of a Reusable Lunar Lander

Laurent Beauregard (1) , Annafederica Urbano (1) , Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez (1) , Joseph Morlier (2)

1 DCAS - Département Conception et conduite des véhicules Aéronautiques et Spatiaux
2 ICA - Institut Clément Ader

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.

Mots clés: Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation; Architecture selection; Optimal trajectory; Reusable Lunar Lander

Domaines: Mécanique des structures [physics.class-ph]

Laurent Beauregard, Annafederica Urbano, Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez, Joseph Morlier. Multidisciplinary Design and Architecture Optimization of a Reusable Lunar Lander. Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, 2021, pp.1-14. ⟨10.2514/1.A34833⟩. ⟨hal-03208741⟩