ACCESS (1G-Artifical Gravity Centrifuge Space Station in Cis-lunar Space): Concept and Operations
Roedolph Opperman, PhD Candidate, MVL
This presentation is on work performed by MIT’s ACCESS team that culminated in a paper that was presented at AIAA Space 2016 last month. ACCESS (ArtifiCial gravity CEntrifuge Space Station) is a proposed 1G space station in lunar orbit that will operate independently without Earth resupply after the first five years of operation. The station will serve as a proving ground for human reproduction in space, a staging post for deep space missions, long duration science experiments and lunar surface exploration. The ACCESS campaign consists of a series of precursor missions to support the gradual build-up and assembly of the ACCESS space station to be completed by 2040. The station will function independently from Earth after the first 5 years of operation via lunar in situ resource utilization (ISRU), on-board food production and in situ fabrication of resources (ISFR). The resources are extracted from the Moon via autonomous operations at a lunar base and transported to the station using an ISRU shuttle. The Lunar Near Rectilinear Orbit (NRO) was selected for the station’s operations location where it will support an initial crew size of 16 with 4 additional infants born and raised on the station. This presentation covers the station and lunar base designs, key subsystem baseline designs, programmatics and risk management strategy of the ACCESS campaign. Our concept was submitted to NASA’s annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) design competition, winning the best in theme award.