Integrating Flexibility into Human Space Exploration Architecture Design Decisions

摘要

Over the past decade, the space industry has increasingly recognized the need for new systems to be designed for flexibility, or the capability to be easily modified in response to changes in future requirements or environments. One recent example is the introduction of the idea of a "Flexible Path" strategy within NASA human space exploration planning. Applying and extending a previously developed quantitative, stochastic, multi-objective, and multi-period framework for integrating flexibility into space system design decisions, this paper analyzes recent human space exploration planning challenges in order to identify and understand the characteristics of Pareto-optimal initial system selection decisions given a 20-year time horizon and environment of evolving future mission destination demands. Specific findings regarding the relative flexibility of candidate architectures, optimal trades between mission achievement and cost, characteristics of system decision policies leading to these optimal trades, and the constraints imposed by short-period budgets are discussed in detail.