The feasibility study will investigate modular mission architectures that facilitate matching launch vehicles, transfer stage capabilities, primary payload, and mission destination to enable rapid mission formulation for SmallSat planetary explorers.
WESTMINSTER, CO, 28 October 2024 – NASA awarded Advanced Space a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project to develop mission architectures and requirements for customizing a low-cost rocket transfer stage that will deliver small spacecraft into nontraditional orbits and provide PNT and communications relay services for the deployed small spacecraft. The project, which will be managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will define modular mission architectures and ConOps that match launch vehicle and transfer stage capabilities to the deployment of a primary payload to its destination orbit.
Advanced Space’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE™) mission and spacecraft design was successful using this methodology to first start with an objective and then define performance requirements to inform the transfer stage design. The proposed solution will result in a mission-planning system that determines the required capabilities of the transfer stage to satisfy any given design reference mission (DRM).
Mission architectures to nontraditional orbits such as low lunar orbit (LLO), Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHOs), and Earth-Moon (E-M) Lagrange points will be developed as well as near-Earth object (NEO) destinations to define transfer stage design requirements. This system enables small spacecraft operations in these unique mission environments, which were previously inaccessible. Advanced Space’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS™) technology will be scoped for the transfer stage platform to provide positioning and navigation solutions for the deployed spacecraft.
Advanced Space has partnered with Firefly Aerospace on this study, using Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle as a transfer stage to begin evaluating mission architectures.
Mission destinations to cislunar space impose cumbersome propulsion, navigation, and communication requirements on small spacecraft. Propulsion to reach the destination orbit, longer communication distances, and lack of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are significant contributors to increased spacecraft size, weight, power, and cost (SWAP-C). These hindrances drive the need to develop services that facilitate operating small spacecraft in these unique mission destinations. This innovation will be developed by equipping transfer stages with technologies that reduce the navigation and communication needs burdening small spacecraft operating at these distances. Any relief of these needs for small spacecraft will contribute to increasing the scientific or commercial return of the primary mission.
As an example, Advanced Space’s CAPS technology can satisfy this need and can provide positioning and navigation solutions to a network of end-user nodes, reducing reliance on ground-based navigation solutions and data transfer. Using a customized deployment of CAPS, the stage may operate as a navigation and communications node for one or many small spacecraft in mission destinations beyond geosynchronous orbit. In this way, the work proposed here will allow small satellites and low-cost missions to access previously unreachable destinations, broadening the possibilities of scientific exploration and commercial endeavors for small-scale missions. This solution will be useful for multiple missions, from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions to secondary payloads for Artemis, to commercial missions flying to the Moon.
We look forward to studying this approach to supporting spacecraft navigation and communications at the Moon and future missions it will support.