Development of a methodology for technology requirement assessment for space habitats

Abstract

There recently has been a renewed focus on space exploration and space habitats all over the world. Future lunar developments should focus on reusability, sustainability and affordability. To comply with these objectives, deep space exploration will be faced with technical and human limitations. New technologies must be developed to overcome these challenges. Because technology development is a long and onerous process, it is important to be able to identify the requirements early in the design process to reduce the risk of new developments. A clear methodology to evaluate the requirements of a technology to meet future goals must be provided to innovative companies. This work aims at establishing a clear and consistent methodology to evaluate future space technologies and compare their impact on several factors of a campaign to define the conceptual requirements. To prove that the developed methodology answers all the targeted requirements of the research objective, it will be tested on a technology: cryocoolers, and the space logistics framework FOLLOW. The proposed methodology uses Technology Impact Forecasting and applies and modifies it to take into consideration the specificity of the problem at hand: a smaller data set, long computation times and the goal of the thesis. The methodology can be used by companies to prove the worth of new innovative ideas and encourage investment. It is a rather safe process to help technology advancement.