MARKDOUGLASCOLEYJR. ONSPACEPROGRAMPLANNING Quantifying the effects of spacefaring goals and strategies on the solution space of feasible programs May 2017 This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of the Graduate School of THEUNIVERSITYOFTEXASATARLINGTON ONSPACEPROGRAMPLANNING Mark Douglas Coley Jr. The following members of the Committee approve this doctoral dissertation of Mark Douglas Coley Jr. Chair Bernd Chudoba, Ph.D. Research advisor Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering University of Texas at Arlington Miguel Amaya, Ph.D. Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering University of Texas at Arlington Paul Componation, Ph.D. Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering University of Texas at Arlington Dudley Smith, Ph.D. Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering University of Texas at Arlington Donald Wilson, Ph.D. Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering University of Texas at Arlington Copyright © 2017 Mark Douglas Coley Jr. all rights reserved FORKYLIE I love you to the moon and back ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Bernd Chudoba, for his guidance, inspiration, and support these past several years. Although I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I am very grateful that he was able to talk me into beginning this journey. Next, I would like to thank all of my friends and colleagues in the AVD Lab, both present and previous members: Thomas McCall, Love- neesh Rana, James Haley, David Woodward, Dr. Lex Gonzalez, Dr. Amen Omoragbon, Dr. Amit Oza, Vincent Ricketts, Navid Mansoory, and Dr. Xiao Peng. I am thankful for the many roles they have as- sumed as teammates on research contracts, mentors, sounding boards, debuggers, proofreaders, and more. I would also like to thank my family for all they have done to get me to this point: thank you to my parents for 29 years of encouragement and coaching (both on and off the field); thank you to my older brother and sister, both of whom I have always looked up to; and thank you to my little sister, Katy, for always being one of my biggest fans. Finally, I would like to thank my beautiful bride, Kylie. She has been a trooper throughout this effort and without her continual love and support, I would never have finished. ABSTRACT An organization’s space program represents the coalescence of top- level goals and strategies with the specific, lower-level combinations of mission architectures, hardware, and technology. High costs and long lead times necessitate substantial planning and key decisions to be made years, possibly decades, in advance. Unfortunately, the methods and processes available for planning have historically been unable to provide decision-makers with objec- tive, quantitative information from both the top and lower levels of the space program. Instead, decision-makers are forced to turn to top-level, qualitative assessments, disconnected from any of the fun- damental, technical details, where inconsistent comparisons and sec- ondary effects often become the basis of decisions. This leads to misin- formed decisions early on that will have the largest impact on the over- all cost and schedule of the program. Similarly, the systems designers and specialists at the lower, technical levels are disconnected from any guidance from the over-arching goals of the program. Therefore, these technical efforts tend to be pursued and optimized separately from the space program as a whole. It is the hypothesis of this research that this disconnect exists but can be parametrically corrected to better support the decision-makers at all levels of a space program. In pursuit of a solution, a prototype decision-support system, Ariadne, has been developed to parametri- cally integrate the top-level effects of goals and strategies with the primary technical details of mission architectures and hardware de- signs. The capabilities of this prototype system are demonstrated with a case study of Project Apollo, enabling informed decisions concern- ing launch vehicle requirements, mission architecture selection, and alternative candidate space programs. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ........................... vi Abstract ................................. vii Table of contents ............................ viii List of figures .............................. xii List of tables ............................... xvi Nomenclature .............................. xviii Chapter Page 1 Introduction & objectives ..................... 1 1.1 Research motivation and background 1 1.2 Structure of the research investigation 3 1.3 Bibliography 4 2 Literature review .......................... 6 2.1 Aircraft conceptual design 6 2.1.1 The importance of early decisions 7 2.1.2 The standard to design 8 2.1.3 Established design processes 9 2.1.4 Applicability to the space domain 11 2.1.5 Ideal specifications 14 2.2 Space mission architecture design 15 2.2.1 Traditional definitions 15 2.2.2 Survey of mission architectures 16 2.2.3 Need for an expansion in scope 22 2.2.4 Ideal specifications 23 2.3 Space program planning 23 2.3.1 Additional definitions 26 2.3.2 Completed survey of mission architectures and space program plans 30 2.3.3 The space exploration hierarchy 33 2.3.4 A review of space planning processes 40 2.3.5 Ideal specifications 50 on space program planning ix 2.4 Compiled list of specifications 50 2.5 Chapter summary 50 2.6 Bibliography 51 3 The solution concept, Ariadne .................. 61 3.1 Ideal methodology concept 61 3.1.1 Walk-through of the ideal solution 61 3.1.2 Identification of prototype specifications 73 3.2 Prototype methodology concept 74 3.2.1 Prototype flow diagram 74 3.2.2 Select and prioritize spacefaring goals 74 3.2.3 Select implementation strategies 75 3.2.4 Derive space program objectives 76 3.2.5 Distribute selected objective payloads among available mission architectures 80 3.2.6 Size required in-space elements 80 3.2.7 Size launch vehicle required for each mission 81 3.2.8 Select number of launch vehicles to be developed and produced to complete program objectives 82 3.2.9 Compare converged candidate programs 83 3.3 Prototype methods 83 3.3.1 Spacefaring goal prioritization 83 3.3.2 Implementation strategy scales definition 85 3.3.3 Derivation of objectives from goals and strategies 85 3.3.4 Mission architecture modeling and the sizing of in-space elements 91 3.3.5 Sizing the launch vehicle 93 3.3.6 Launch vehicle cost estimation 97 3.4 Software implementation 101 3.4.1 Top-level walk-through of the Ariadne script 101 3.4.2 Required input files 106 3.4.3 Python requirements 111 3.5 Chapter summary 112 3.6 Bibliography 112 4 Project Apollo – a case study in space program planning ............................... 117 4.1 Introduction to Project Apollo 118 4.2 Sizing the required launch vehicles 121 4.2.1 Introduction to the Saturn family of launch vehicles 121 4.2.2 Sizing demonstration with the Saturn IB 121 4.2.3 Results of the sizing Saturn V 128 4.2.4 Conclusions 130 x coley jr. 4.3 Comparison of mission architectures 131 4.3.1 Background of the mission architecture decision 132 4.3.2 Developing a parametric model 133 4.3.3 Walk-through comparison of the Direct, EOR, and LOR mission architectures 135 4.3.4 Results and discussion 140 4.4 Comparison of program alternatives leading up to Project Apollo 143 4.4.1 Background of possible program directions 144 4.4.2 Comparison of alternative spacefaring goals 147 4.4.3 Comparison of candidate programs 152 4.4.4 Conclusions 158 4.5 Chapter summary 159 4.6 Bibliography 159 5 Conclusions ............................. 163 5.1 Summary of original contributions 164 5.2 Recommended future work 164 5.2.1 Real-time dashboard user interface 165 5.2.2 Refining the connection to space program objectives 165 Appendix A Complete survey of mission architectures and program plans ......................... 166 A.1 Bibliography 174 B Process Library ........................... 197 B.1 Introduction 197 B.2 Nassi-Shneiderman charts 197 B.3 Process library 197 B.3.1 Mars Project 199 B.3.2 Koelle - Vehicle characteristics 200 B.3.3 Joy - Long-range planning 201 B.3.4 Mass ratio design 202 B.3.5 STAMP - Martin Marietta 203 B.3.6 STAMP - General Dynamics 204 B.3.7 Program analysis and evaluation 205 B.3.8 Space Planners Guide 206 B.3.9 Mission success evaluation 207 B.3.10 Chamberlain - Comparing policy 208 B.3.11 Greenberg - STARS 209 B.3.12 Weigel - Bringing policy into design 210 B.3.13 AVDsizing 211 B.4 Bibliography 212 on space program planning xi C Additional validation of the Space Planners Guide sizing process ............................ 214 C.1 Bibliography 216 LISTOFFIGURES 1.1 Visualization of the hypothetical problem in space program planning....................... 3 1.2 Overall structure of the rest of this dissertation...... 4 2.1 Outline of Chapter 2 ..................... 6 2.2 The importance of early design decisions......... 7 2.3 Standard ladder to design.................. 8 2.4 Extract from “Dream Airplanes”.............. 9 2.5 A structogram representation of Loftin’s subsonic aircraft design process.................... 9 2.6 Solution space of the Bréguet ranges of three different aircraft configurations.................... 11 2.7 Comparisons between the aircraft and spacecraft domains 12 2.8 Morgenthaler’s comparisons between the aircraft and spaceflight domains...................... 13 2.9 Desired goals for the design process............ 14 2.10 NASA’s breakdown of the elements involved in planning a given project................... 26 2.11 Typical decision timeline of a commercial program... 26 2.12 NASA’s representation of the interaction between the life-cycles of the program and project........... 27 2.13 H.H. Koelle’s four space program constraints....... 28 2.14 Completed survey of mission architectures and program plans........................