Electric Propulsion, an Enabling Technology for the Deep Space Gateway

The new era of space exploration has begun with the intent of expanding the frontiers of knowledge, capability, and opportunities in space, to bring humans back to the Moon before sending them to Mars. One of the first milestones is represented by the settlement of the Deep Space Gateway by the mid 2020’s in the lunar proximity, thanks to the exploitation of key technologies such as high-power Solar Electric Propulsion, which will be the propulsive core of the Gateway. In compliance with the current plans of efficiently reduce the number of development and validation efforts, designing and exploiting same elements for multiple missions, this paper proposes an innovative high-power electric space tug to support the replenishment of the Station, which should be flexible enough to be adopted in different phases of the Gateway lifetime. Exploiting a tailored MATLAB design tool, the main mission, mass and power budgets are provided for several spacecraft configurations and electric propulsion subsystem architectures. Moreover, the impact of adopting this cornerstone technology on the platform design is investigated with respect to different thruster working points. Then, the optimal LST configuration able to support the Gateway crew for different resupply needs is selected and its design is presented in detail.