The Moon and NEAs as sources of cislunar propellant; removing some constraints from a recent paper drives down lunar sourced propellant cost

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The Moon and NEAs as sources of cislunar propellant; removing some constraints from a recent paper drives down lunar sourced propellant cost

Bennett, Nicholas J. / Xie, Ruida / Dempster, Andrew G.

Abstract Space Resource Utilization could reduce the mass, cost, and risks of future space activities. The many nonlinear and compounding effects mean that seemingly insignificant concept of operations choices can invalidate the conclusions of sophisticated analyses. Here we successively relax self-imposed constraints in a recent publication to demonstrate that the proximity of a market and the benefits of aerobraking cannot be omitted.

Highlights • Earth Moon proximity allows a high cadence of space resource transportation. • Higher cadence allows costs to be amortized over a higher mass of delivered product. • A powerful economic advantage of the proximity of lunar resources is demonstrated. • Modifying a published model, we can show orders of magnitude reduction in costs. • Fair comparison of resource locations must incorporate multiple missions over time.