Rideshare and the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle: the Key to Low-cost Lagrange-point Missions

Rideshare and the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle: the Key to Low-cost Lagrange-point Missions

Rideshare is a well proven approach, in both LEO and GEO, enabling low-cost space access through splitting of launch charges between multiple passengers. Demand exists from users to operate payloads at Lagrange points, but a lack of regular rides results in a deficiency in rideshare opportunities. As a result, such mission architectures currently rely on a costly dedicated launch. NASA and Moog have jointly studied the technical feasibility, risk and cost of using an Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) to offer Lagrange point rideshare opportunities. This OMV would be launched as a secondary passenger on a commercial rocket into Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) and utilize the Moog ESPA secondary launch adapter. The OMV is effectively a free flying spacecraft comprising a full suite of avionics and a propulsion system capable of performing GTO to Lagrange point transfer via a weak stability boundary orbit. In addition to traditional OMV ’tug’ functionality, scenarios using the OMV to host payloads for operation at the Lagrange points have also been analyzed. This analysis has led to definition of a mission concept to allow space weather monitoring at the Earth-Sun L1 point as well as perform the technology demonstration of an advanced solar sail payload.