Propulsion Alternatives for Mars Transportation Architectures

What is it about?

This researched looked at different propulsion system options for a crewed mission to Mars using propellants available on the Moon. The categories that were analyzed for system performance were the volume of the propellant, mass of propellant, vehicle dry mass, number of aggregation launches, and number of missions possible per engine block. The propulsion system that yielded the best overall performance was the Liquid-oxygen Augmented Nuclear Thermal Rocket (LANTR) engine despite having a higher propellant mass than a hydrogen-based nuclear thermal propulsion engine.

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