Top-Level Considerations for Planning Lunar/Planetary Habitat Structures

This paper highlights important considerations to guide overall planning and element design of lunar/planetary surface habitat structures. Driving influences include stringent launch/landing payload limitations; high costs of human time for surface deployment and operational readiness; influences of the harsh environment on structures, devices and crews; and a paucity of equipment and human and consumable resources that necessitates extreme economies. General habitat concept options are proposed along with desired attributes for comparative assessments of figure of merit (FOM) rankings. Eight broad FOM categories are applied as a basis for top-level option evaluations: (1) launch optimization features, (2) landing optimization features, (3) habitat capacity and functionality, (4) environmental factors and features, (5) deployment and operational readiness, (6) reliability and maintainability, (7) commonality with other surface systems, and (8) pathways and potentials for growth. Much of the content of thi...