Space transportation system and mission planning for regular interplanetary missions

This paper develops a computationally efficient and scalable mission planning optimization method for regular space transportation missions, defined as a set of repeating and periodic interplanetary transportation missions over a long time horizon after one or a few setup missions. As more long-term manned missions to Mars are being conceptualized, the need for a sustainable interplanetary transportation system has become increasingly prominent. However, planning regular transportation missions with existing space mission planning optimization formulations has a limitation in computational scalability in the time dimension. The proposed partially periodic time-expanded network can address this limitation of the past studies; it is shown to be computationally scalable and capable of generating solutions that are practically preferred. Properties of the proposed partially periodic time-expanded network are analyzed, and a case study reveals that the total initial mass in the low Earth orbit of regular missions approaches to the theoretical lower bound as the number of transportation missions increases.