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Mission Plan For Missions

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In addition to staging emergency crew, the ISS could stage mission specialists for missions traversing in or near LEO. One example of this is the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) retrieval mission called the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). The current ARM mission plan is to dispatch an unmanned spacecraft collect and redirect a boulder from a NEA to lunar orbit14. Once there, a human mission would be dispatched to study the asteroid. As the drive of the mission would be primarily scientific discovery, the composition of astronauts would lean heavily toward scientists. To support the mission or series of mission, the mission team can be launched to the ISS as jumping off point allowing the astronauts to become acclimated and practice their …show more content…

Besides constructing a station, lunar missions could utilize the ISS as a debarkation and destination point for space only spacecraft traveling between Earth and lunar orbit which NASA already has planned for the Deep Space Gateway16. By utilizing this kind of spacecraft for lunar missions, the overall design would relieve engineers from creating a spacecraft capable from reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and operating in deep space. Creating a simpler spacecraft would make the spacecraft much easier to refurbish and resupply for multi-use and multi-purpose deep space missions.
Although the Moon is close enough to consider launching an entire mission from the Earth’s surface on one rocket, Mars and other places would require a much more complex mission profile. Designs for human missions to Mars typically involve building a deep space vehicle. This assembly alone would require either an effort similar to the construction of the ISS or utilizing the ISS as a construction area for the spacecraft. Similar to what could be done for lunar missions, the ISS could provide the same kind of mission preparation and support for Mars missions to build a spacecraft and provide an in-orbit staging area for supplies and crew. However, unlike lunar missions, the ISS may be critical to keeping costs manageable as it provides a significant support capability which would not need to be launched during mission

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