LEVITATE
designemaideaprojectsspaceundergrad
The EMA senior design spans two semesters; the first develops an idea into a consumer product, while the second tasks us to design an airplane, submarine, or spaceship. Last semester I developed BoomAlert, a device to warn sailboat crews of a dangerous boom movements. This semester Tim, Adam, Kevin, Tyler, and I are developing LEVITATE, the Lunar Exploration Vehicle for Intraplanetary Transport And Terrestrial Expansion. Props to Kevin for the NASA-worthy acronym.
We documented (somewhat) LEVITATE's development over the semester, see Team LEVITATE. We're also on Twitter, give us a follow.
Project Summary
LEVITATE is a lunar exploration vehicle capable of providing intra-lunar transportation of two astronauts to any scientifically interesting or resource-rich location by means of orbital and sub-orbital transfers. It has the capability to sustain two astronauts for up to fourteen Earth days at the remote site. LEVITATE is motivated by a dichotomy in the way our nation has previously planned to explore the Moon, as presented in the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee's analyses of possible lunar missions. LEVITATE enables global lunar access in addition to lunar base development.
Project Documents
RASC-AL Presentation [.pdf, 4.5MB]
Ben's Recap
Let's keep it short: over the course of 66 days, 5 undergraduate Engineering Mechanics students designed a spaceship. The semester began with some pie-in-the-sky ideas on aerospace vehicles capable of carrying two people or 500 lbs...
...proceeded to some rocket science...
...included some enthusiasm...
...and ended with a 7" stack of engineering drawings.
Assuming a standard daily consumption of 2 20oz bottles of Mt. Dew, each member drank approximately 20gal (78L) of the lime-green stimulant. Of course, this increase in consumption is inversely-mirrored by the daily decrease in sleep, as the May deadline approached. Thankfully, the feared correlation between frustration with Solidworks and optical mouse failure was not observed. All-told, team LEVITATE put a ton of work into the project, learned countless lessons about engineering design and documentation, team coordination, and individual motivation along the way, and left with an invaluable encapsulization of their undergraduate education.
RASC-AL Competition Summary
As briefly mentioned on the blog, we entered LEVITATE into the 2010 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage forum, held in Cocoa Beach, FL. This program solicits undergraduate and graduate teams to solve general problems faced by NASA's exploration efforts. Solutions to these problems are grounded in academic research, leverage existing technologies and systems, and optimize some essential parameter, usually mass or fuel consumed.
The key advantage of an intra-lunar vehicle like LEVITATE is that it allow mass (money) to be spent building a permanently-inhabited base at a single lunar location while providing access to the entire lunar surface. Thus, it combines the 'Lunar Outpost' concept — future missions reuse equipment and facilities launched on previous missions — with the 'Lunar Global' concept, where short missions are conducted at various locations, returning samples to Earth for analysis and never returning to the same location. Once on the lunar surface LEVITATE requires no Earth-launched resources. Assuming lunar resource gathering and processing is a significant activity, LEVITATE's fuel can be collected with no additional effort during this processing. And since more than four lunar equipment landings are required to enable continual human habitation, there will be a surplus of spare landers on the lunar surface from which to salvage replacement parts for the majority of LEVITATE's systems.
As you may appreciate above, LEVITATE was designed to every nut and bolt and, I would argue, that we gave the best presentation/paper/poster session of our vehicle in the undergraduate competition. The only outstanding elements of our design were those systems that we knew depended heavily on the other systems in the lunar architecture (outpost module, spacesuits, robotic assets, etc.) and/or those that were already of a sufficient technology readiness level (>TRL 6) to give us confidence in their availability. (This is why we fully designed the life support, vehicle structure, suitport airlocks, and habitat wall structure.) Unfortunately, from the perspective of the RASC-AL competition, this reliance on the lunar exploration architecture and the time pressure of our academic schedule prevented us from adequately documenting our vehicle design decisions. While I can attest to the background research performed on each system choice and our valuation of each option, these decisions were not conducted nor documented in the most rigorous way (namely trade studies). Our compressed development and decision-making process, combined with RASC-AL's virtual requirement of trade studies, prevented us from placing in the competition. Despite that, I greatly enjoyed developing LEVITATE and my time in Florida.
A Sample Size D Drawing
This assembly drawing is one of the panels that form LEVITATE's pressure vessel. The annotations refer to additional drawings that describe components of the wall panel. This drawing describes how those parts should be arranged and fixed together.
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