Analysis and Evaluation of Large Cislunar Platforms

A primary objective of the Artemis program is to establish a sustainable presence on the Moon, which includes developing lunar bases. These bases will support scientific research, resource exploration, and utilization and serve as a platform for further solar system exploration. However, building lunar bases presents several challenges, including surviving the Moon's harsh environment. For example, micrometeorite impacts pose significant safety risks to astronauts due to the absence of an atmosphere to mitigate these effects. Additionally, Cislunar Space's rapid expansion and development could result in pollution from space debris, potentially rendering the area unusable in the long term without effective Cislunar Space Traffic Management. Addressing the need to develop the lunar surface responsibly will require responsibly developing Cislunar space.Facilities in the Cislunar space will likely play a critical role as strategic sites to facilitate the roll-out of indispensable services. These services range from communication, position, navigation, and timing (PNT), power generation, fuel, and logistics storage/warehousing to repair depots and servicing sites. The facilities will likely work in concert with monitoring assets that will be used to perform space domain awareness in Cislunar space and enable space traffic management. There are several avenues to pursue these ambitious development steps, including deploying large swarm constellations of spacecraft or a few large space platforms. This paper focuses on several space platform configurations and compares them to spacecraft swarms. Through this comparison, we identify technology that can be filled by new and upcoming space platform architecture to address many space development needs.