Rules of the Road: Engineers Have Built a Traffic Control System for the Moon
Historically, humankind has sent only one thing to the moon at a time so that it has the whole metaphorical highway to itself. But NASA’s planned moon base is expected to have a lot more concurrent traffic in the future, which means it’s time to start writing rules for a busier road. Engineers from Texas A&M, Purdue and NASA’s Johnson Space Center joined forces to help write some of those rules.
The system is outlined in a recent study, and it’s a lot more complex than one would think. Gateway and other spacecraft orbiting the moon are expected to use the near-rectilinear halo orbit, which takes spacecraft around both poles of the moon.
This is pretty simple for a single space station like the now-defunct Gateway space station, for which this control system was designed, but it gets complicated quickly when you have the Orion crew capsule, uncrewed cargo...
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