Doing More with Less: Co-Design of Human Moon and Mars Architectures with Their Funding Sources

As the next Moon landing draws ever closer, the landscape of human space exploration is changing quickly. Over the last decade, sixteen countries have established new space agencies, and there are currently 52 signatories to the Artemis Accords. Private citizens can now travel to space and back using commercial services, with reusable boosters and spacecraft at the heart of the new capabilities. Reusability, mass production of space systems and the scaling-up of the space value chains are driving ongoing reductions in the cost of access to space and an exponential increase in capacity for crew and payload to orbit. Within this context, larger campaigns to the Moon and Mars are increasingly being studied, especially by commercial organizations and academia, motivated by their increased cost-effectiveness, robustness and potential to inspire. However, despite the multiple advantages of larger missions, the caps on taxpayer funding, a legacy of expensive cost-plus contracts, a general risk-aversion and a perception that larger missions would be even more unaffordable than smaller ones, all contribute to NASA still officially planning only for small Moon and Mars surface missions of 2–4 crew. This paper deconstructs and refutes the implicit assumption that larger missions are impossible to finance and demonstrates that NASA can do more with less: we show that larger human exploration missions would benefit from being co-designed alongside an international funding scheme well-aligned with stakeholder needs, such that the cost/benefit trade-off for each nation's taxpayers dominates that of a smaller mission. We do this by (1) modeling campaign architectures over a broad range of scales to quantify the economies of scale and scope arising from larger and longer-lasting campaigns and missions, and (2) by modeling the willingness and ability of Artemis Accords members to contribute an annual “subscription price”, in exchange for participation of their nationals in upcoming historic missions to the Moon and Mars. The latter model uses five parameters including GDP, population and sovereign credit ratings to estimate the likely deep space human exploration budgets of each Artemis Accords member nation. These model results were validated against recent human spaceflight history, with broad correspondence between the nationalities of ISS astronauts vs. model predictions. The methods were applied to two NASA-award-winning mission architecture case studies summarized here, the 36-crew Pale Red Dot mission to Mars, and the 154-crew MARTEMIS lunar campaign. The model was stress-tested with random lack of political will and with doubling of DDT&E and launch costs, finding that both PRD and MARTEMIS remain feasible within current NASA budgets and at subscription prices affordable to sufficient AA members. The Pale Red Dot case study results show that, at a 95% confidence level, a 4-crew mission to Mars with 2 NASA, 1 ESA and 1 JAXA astronauts would cost NASA between $1-$3B per year for 18 years, whereas a 36-crew mission with 8 NASA astronauts and the remaining 28 crew hailing from 20 Artemis Accords signatories would cost NASA between $0.9 - $2.4B per year over 27 years; analogous findings were made for the MARTEMIS campaign. This work contributes to motivating NASA and its Artemis Accords partners to collaborate in designing and co-funding larger, safer, more inspiring and more cost-effective human missions to the Moon and Mars.