Forging Lunar Pressurized Rovers for Artemis

When NASA and it’s partners return to the Moon as part of the Artemis Program they will be staying longer not only in the commercial lunar landers, but by utilizing surface assets such as Pressurized Rovers and Surface Habitats. These surface assets will allow astronauts to travel farther from the landing site and perform telerobotic science operations during uncrewed intervals as well. Currently NASA is evaluating options for a surface mobility system. The JSC Concurrent Engineering Design Studio known as the Forge has been helping the NASA Pressurized Rover (PR) Project with evaluating several concepts of what that Rover could be. The Forge led several short sprint design sessions with various subsystem experts to brainstorm capabilities, ground rules, concept of operations and generated CAD, MEL/PEL/THEL for the concepts. The results are helpful for the project to evaluate feasibility concepts independent of other previous designs for various constraints of the launch vehicle and lander as well as which capabilities can be incorporated. The first was a bare bones minimum rover to meet the threshold limits of a cargo lander’s capabilities for fairing volume and downmass. This limited capability rover illustrated the limitations of logistics, EVA operations and concerns for meeting human health and performance standards for a crew vehicle. As the rover design matured a list of highly desired capabilities was developed and that fed into the second Forge session. The outcome of the second Forge was a more robust "goal" rover with extended operational capabilities. This paper will discuss both concepts and how they helped the NASA PR team move through Mission Concept Review(MCR) towards KDP-C. (Key Decision Point C (KDP-C) is the agency-level approval for the project to begin implementation and baselines the project's official schedule and budget.)