From the Moon to Mars Base Camp: An Updated Architecture that Builds on Artemis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-4137.vid Lockheed Martin has a longstanding history of designing, building, and operating spacecraft for deep space applications. This includes over 20 successful interplanetary missions, ranging from the first successful Mars lander mission, Viking I, in 1976 to the current Mars lander InSight. Lockheed Martin is also the prime contractor for Orion, providing NASA with the capability for deep space human exploration. To enable future missions, the Advanced Programs team at Lockheed Martin studies aerospace architectures for Moon and Mars exploration through developing concepts, trades, and early system designs. In 2016, Lockheed Martin presented a vision for achieving crewed exploration of Martian space. Known as Mars Base Camp, this design reference mission envisioned a crewed vehicle in Martian orbit from which astronauts could perform excursions to Phobos and Deimos and could also perform telerobotic exploration of the Martian surface, including sample return. This concept served as an “existence proof” for a novel, practical, and affordable path to enable human exploration of the Martian system in the next decade, enabling detailed discussions about the requisite technologies and systems necessary to achieve this audacious objective. In 2017, an update to the Mars Base Camp concept was published that included the production of propellant from water, additional details for the cislunar proving ground missions, and a single-stage fully reusable Mars lander concept. Now in 2021, as part of the Artemis era of space exploration, space agencies are working together with their industry partners to establish systems and infrastructure that enable sustained lunar missions and to develop capabilities for Mars. The planning for this next phase is possible now that Orion and the Space Launch System are about to perform their initial missions together, the initial Gateway elements are in design and production, and the set of regular lunar robotic landing missions from a diversity of countries and companies has begun. Each mission to the lunar surface, either crewed or robotic, offers the opportunity to demonstrate new technologies and operations. These new technologies and operations enhance exploration and scientific discovery, build upon previous missions, and mature those same capabilities for Mars. This paper discusses an update to the Mars Base Camp concept that builds on the capabilities that will be developed and demonstrated through Artemis missions. It presents the trades that led to this update in Mars Base Camp design, including the benefits and limitations of conjunction versus opposition class missions. Additionally, the paper discusses the trade of implementing chemical, nuclear thermal, or nuclear electric propulsion. An update to the Mars Base Camp architecture is presented based on the results of these trades. Then the paper describes the sequence for constructing Mars Base Camp at the Gateway, showing how its construction and operation align with payload delivery and technology maturation planned in the Artemis lunar missions. This updated Mars Base Camp reference mission will renew the robust discussions around moving humanity forward into a viable, sustainable long-term Mars exploration program, building on the Artemis exploration program, with the first crewed Mars mission possible in the 2030s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.044 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".