A team from Thales Alenia, a Franco-Italian aerospace company, is developing the design for an electric-powered lunar space tug. The reusable vehicle would fly back and forth between Earth and the Moon, transporting cargo and passengers. It would be refueled at a low Earth orbit fuel depot and maintained by astronauts on the Moon and International Space Station. Reports NBC News.
The greatest advantage of the tug is that it would run off Hall Effect Thrusters, which use electric propulsion. In this sense, the tug would be powered much like NASA’s Dawn spacecraft and Japan’s Hayabuse 2.
The space-tug concept is described in an Acta Astronautica paper, “The Lunar Space Tug: a sustainable bridge between low Earth orbits and the Cislunar Habitat.”
From the abstract:
Based on the experience of the [International Space Station], one of the most widespread ideas is to develop a Cislunar Station in preparation of long duration missions in a deep space environment. Cislunar space is defined as the area of deep space under the influence of Earth-Moon system, including a set of special orbits, e.g. Earth-Moon Libration points and Lunar Retrograde Orbit. This habitat represents a suitable environment for demonstrating and testing technologies and capabilities in deep space.
In order to achieve this goal, there are several crucial systems and technologies, in particular related to transportation and launch systems.The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is a reusable transportation capsule designed to provide crew transportation in deep space missions, whereas NASA is developing the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, which could provide the necessary heavy-lift launch capability to support the same kind of missions. These innovations would allow quite-fast transfers from Earth to the Cislunar Station and vice versa, both for manned and unmanned missions.
However, taking into account the whole Concept of Operations for both the growth and sustainability of the Cislunar Space Station, the Lunar Space Tug can be considered as an additional, new and fundamental element for the mission architecture. The Lunar Space Tug represents an alternative to the SLS scenario, especially for what concerns all unmanned or logistic missions (e.g. cargo transfer, on orbit assembly, samples return), from Low Earth Orbit to Cislunar space. The paper focuses on the mission analysis and conceptual design of the Lunar Space Tug to support the growth and sustainment of the Cislunar Station. Particular attention is dedicated to the analysis of the propulsion subsystem effects of the Lunar Space Tug design.