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This topic is offered for NewMars members who would like to contribute to a store of knowledge about how NASA and other space agencies are designing (or thinking about designing) missions that would put human explorers on various bodies in the Solar System.
This topic might include mission architecture designs created by NewMars members.
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This post is reserved for an index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members over time.
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From another review of available documentation on the radiation environment posed by Earth's Van Allen Belts and random but potentially quite powerful Solar Particle Events, it would appear as though the non-rotating lander attached to the front of the Interplanetary Transport Vehicle (ITV) must serve as the radiation shelter. This implies the colonists' lander / lifeboat is the ITV's primary food and water storage container. There's no great issue with doing this, because any remaining food and water will be offloaded with the colonists when they separate from the ITV to make their descent to the surface of Mars, while the ITV continues to loop around on its free-return trajectory towards Earth.
I'm specifying the lander design from NASA's Manned Mars Mission Design Reference Architecture (DRA) 5.0:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ … A-5-A2.pngThe "triconic" reentry aeroshell depicted above is roughly 10m diameter and 30m in length. Reentry mass is 110,200kg. Landed payload mass is 40,400kg. My design would be lengthened to provide greater delivered payload, somewhere near 50,000kg. The major difference is that my lander facsimile will not use a split aeroshell design that splits apart during reentry, as depicted above, and it will be larger / heavier to accommodate a 50,000kg+ payload vs 40,400kg payload. It's a 125% landed payload scale-up of NASA's DRA 5.0 lander concept for the 500 colonists and residual supplies removed from the ITV. My variant of NASA's Mars Lander Vehicle (MLV) would remain intact through all phases of entry / descent / landing, a composite pressure vessel design wrapped in appropriate heat shielding materials to survive the reentry at Mars.
NASA's design specifies LOX/LCH4 engines, but to my knowledge small man-rated retro-rocket engines using that propellant combo don't exist, so perhaps LOX/RP1, which provides very similar Isp and better thrust, as well as having the benefit of being a fully developed propulsion system in active use, will be substituted instead. Some other design modifications may also be incorporated to produce a greater aerobraking effect, since this vehicle will be heavier and reenter at a higher interplanetary velocity, so braking aids such as the body fins used on Starship will likely be part of the MLV design.
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