Concepts Leading to a Sustainable Architecture for Cislunar Development

We have been studying an architecture for Cislunar Development that includes early deployment of an Exploration Platform at one of the Earth – Moon Lagrange points. The Exploration Platform provides a flexible basis for future exploration, since it reduces cost through reuse of expensive vehicles and reduces the number of launches needed to accomplish missions. International Space Station (ISS) industry partners have been working for the past two years on concepts for using ISS development methods and residual assets to support a broad range of exploration missions. These concepts have matured along with planning details for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) to allow serious consideration for a platform located in the Earth-Moon Libration (EML) system. We propose using the mass margin available on the 2017 uncrewed ORION/SLS test flight to launch secondary science payloads that advance science and exploration objectives.