NASA Human Spaceflight Architecture Team: Cis-Lunar Analysis

The Cis-Lunar Destination Team of NASA's Human Spaceflight Architecture Team (HAT) has been performing analyses of a number of cis-lunar locations to inform architecture development, transportation and destination elements definition, and operations. The cis-lunar domain is defined as that area of deep space under the gravitation influence of the earth-moon system, including a set of orbital locations (low earth orbit [LEO], geosynchronous earth orbit [GEO], highly elliptical orbits [HEO]); earth-moon libration or "Lagrange" points (EML1 through EML5, and in particular, EML1 and EML2), and low lunar orbit (LLO). We developed a set of cislunar mission concepts defined by mission duration, pre-deployment, type of mission, and location, to develop mission concepts and the associated activities, capabilities, and architecture implications. To date, we have produced two destination operations concepts based on present human space exploration architectural considerations. We have recently begun defining mission activities that could be conducted within an EM L1 or EM L2 facility. This paper will review details of this work.