Trade Study of Excavation Tools and Equipment for Lunar Outpost Development and ISRU

The NASA Lunar Architecture Team (LAT) has developed a candidate architecture to establish a lunar outpost that includes in‐situ resource utilization (ISRU). Outpost development requires excavation for landing and launch sites, roads, trenches, foundations, radiation and thermal shielding, etc. Furthermore, ISRU requires excavation as feed stock for water processing and oxygen production plants. The design environment for lunar excavation tools and equipment including low gravity, cost of launching massive equipment, limited power, limited size, high reliability, and extreme temperatures is significantly different from terrestrial excavation equipment design environment. Consequently, the lunar application requires new approaches to developing excavation tools and equipment in the context of a systems engineering approach to building a Lunar Outpost. Several authors have proposed interesting and innovative general excavation approaches in the literature, and the authors of this paper will propose adaptations and/or new excavation concepts specific to the Lunar Outpost. The requirements for excavation from the LAT architecture will be examined and quantified with corresponding figures of merit and evaluation criteria. This paper will evaluate the proposed approaches using traditional decision making with uncertainty techniques.