Space-Based Solar Power: Implications for Operational Robustness in Lunar EVAs and Exploration Architectures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Human exploration of the lunar surface has large power requirements for both the lunar base and for rover exploration. NASA’s recent contract awards indicate a reliance on fission surface power. While nuclear options provide reliable power to lunar base locations, they have a limited reach that restricts exploration capacity. The Space Exploration Vehicle’s 125-mile range only allows coverage of 0.34% of the lunar surface. A constellation of space-based solar power (SBSP) satellites paired with pressurized rovers allows 24-h, full-surface coverage on excursions from the lunar base. A case study is conducted of the constellation design, system cost, operational lifetime, and power provided using SBSP. Results of the case study demonstrate that SBSP provides an additional 20 kW/h of emergency power and extends EVA range from 125 to 1000 km to cover 26 of the lunar geologic units, at an added lifecycle cost of less than 1% of the baseline mission cost. Addition of a SBSP constellation for rovers provides operational flexibility, safety, and robustness to enable multiple lunar exploration architectures beyond that enabled by surface power infrastructures, and should be further explored for lunar missions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".