Multiple Asteroid Retrieval Mission from Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway Using Reusable Spacecrafts

Comparison of material sources and customer locations for commercial space resource utilization

“…For each scenario for which the optimization found no solution, meaning that the non-linear constraints could not be satisfied, no information is given. For scenarios involving Earth-based resources (first column), ∆V I is the ∆V from the parking orbit (at 185 km [45]) to the destination, because there is only a cargo spacecraft directly from LEO, without a mining phase, as discussed in Section 2.1.…”

Economic assessment of high-thrust and solar-sail propulsion for near-earth asteroid mining

“…• Chemical propulsion: launch to LEO (185 km) using the SpaceX BFR (Gargioni et al, 2019), which is used at its maximum allowable payload capacity (150 tons (Musk, 2018), i.e., 136 metric tonnes) with the cargo spacecraft and a kick stage, both including propellant. The kick stage will bring the cargo spacecraft from LEO to an escape trajectory with C 3 = 0 km 2 /s 2 .…”

“…• Solar sail: launch to LEO (185 km) using the SpaceX BFR (Gargioni et al, 2019), which is again used at its maximum allowable payload capacity (136 metric tonnes (Musk, 2018)) with a fleet of mid-term solar sails (lightness number β 0 = 0.1 (Dachwald, 2005)) and a kick stage including propellant used to inject the stowed sails to an Earth escape trajectory with C 3 = 0 km 2 /s 2 . A fleet is used to ensure that the sails are of reasonable size, rather than one very large sail.…”

“…Current work focuses on asteroid classification (Bus and Binzel, 2003), developing architectures and designing missions for asteroid mining (Andrews et al, 2015;Dorrington and Olsen, 2019), compiling sets of attainable target asteroids (Sanchez and McInnes, 2011;Yárnoz et al, 2013), trajectory optimization to NEAs (Tan et al, 2018;Peloni et al, 2016;Mingotti et al, 2014;Sánchez and Yárnoz, 2016), employing reusable launch vehicles (e.g., SpaceX BFR (Gargioni et al, 2019)) for asteroid mining missions or employing solar sails for sample return and mining missions (Dachwald and Seboldt, 2005;Hughes et al, 2006;McInnes, 2017;Peloni et al, 2016;Grundmann et al, 2019) and the economic modelling of asteroid mining ventures (Sonter, 1997;Ross, 2001;Hein et al, 2020;Gertsch and Gertsch, 2005;Andrews et al, 2015;Oxnevad, 1991;Dorrington and Olsen, 2019). While this addresses many issues important during the design of a profitable asteroid mining mission, little research has been done on integrating economical modelling into the optimization of trajectories to NEAs.…”