Nowadays, human Moon exploration, and the consequent desire to establish a permanent settlement on its surface, represents one of the most fascinating challenge to face. The permanent presence of a human outpost very far from Earth raises the problem of the huge amount of payload required for the settlement, as well as the need of rapid and in-time supply of material and spare parts useful for all the activities carried out in-situ, including the realization of medicals tools and patient-specific back-up implants.

This work has primarily focused on establishing scenarios where inflatable devices could be the most useful. Given that these missions rely on aerodynamic drag that results in (potentially significant) heating, the authors have sought to find solutions to minimize heat fluxes acting on the device surface, and especially keeping it within the limits of flexible/foldable TPS materials for the aerocapture scenario.

Grid stiffened structures are a type of CFRP structure that is created by arranging multiple ribs in a type of lattice network. Each rib is created from unidirectional pre-preg plies and is joined together in nodes. For this particular application/technology also a skin is foreseen to close the gaps left in the grid structure. This type of configuration allows for structures with a very high specific strength and specific stiffness. The activity seeks to further develop the technology for use in a launcher inter-stage application.

The main objective of the OMAR Mission Architecture study is to identify and trade-off different mission architectures, to provide different services on-orbit. For each of the relevant scenarios, this objective shall be achieved by defining the associated system functional analysis and by trading-off different architectures and concepts of operations. Furthermore, the impact of aspects such as: operational orbit, type of serviced satellites, services provided, different levels of autonomy, and any other relevant factors is to be assessed.

One of the issues facing the development of manned, long duration space missions is how to manage liquids/gases for life support. Gases such as O2, CO2, CH4 etc are inputs and by-products of life support systems, for non-regenerative (open-loop) systems. Stores should be enough to sustain any short duration crew visit and until regenerating (closed loop) systems can be installed.

Solid state optical refrigeration is the only active cryocooling technique that is truly vribration free, due to absence of moving parts and mass transport, with significant potential for use in future space missions. However, the overall wallplug efficiency is still relatively low in current approaches. One alternative approach investigated here is using a solar pumped laser (SPL) to drive the optical cryocooling process. This approach could offer higher efficiency by eliminates two conversion losses.