Reusability Analysis for Lunar Landers

As NASA strives to return to the lunar surface with the Artemis program, there is a need to understand if an expendable or reusable architecture should be used. To address this question, this work presents a multidisciplinary model that explores the lunar lander design space to understand how reusability affects the chosen objectives of IMLEO, lifecycle cost, and safety. For the Artemis program, we found an expendable design to be more cost-effective than implementing reusability, as only five surface missions are currently planned. However, if additional missions are added, a hybrid implementation of reusability, which entails reusing the transfer and ascent elements multiple times by changing out line-replacement units after each mission, becomes the most cost effective. A fully reusable design, where the transfer and ascent elements only require consumables to be replenished between missions, was also investigated, although it was less cost effective than a hybrid design for the range of values studied.