Lunar In-Situ Resource Utilization Campaign Impacts Analysis, featuring Alejandro Pensado

While investigating the use of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the Moon to create propellant to support lunar and Mars missions, Alejandro Pensado muses, “If you are setting up this ‘gas station’, if you will, how would you go about it?”

Pensado, an Analytical Mechanics Associates analyst with the Space Mission Analysis Branch (SMAB) at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, aims to answer this question by providing details on the benefits, risks, and costs associated with various ISRU concepts. The project came about as part of the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s (STMD) efforts to evaluate ISRU as a technology and its future for lunar and Mars missions.

“Lunar ISRU could allow for the significant expansion of human exploration activities, but all within the right context,” Pensado explains. Determining this “right context” is an integral part of the study, including understanding both the propellant demand required by system concepts and the technology infrastructure that needs to be in place to meet those demands. Pensado is providing data to inform ISRU investment and development decisions by formulating the ISRU architecture concepts and developing Python code to execute the data analysis calculations. These results show where lunar ISRU is or is not impactful and identify the major design drivers.

“If you are setting up this ‘gas station’, if you will, how would you go about it?”

Notional lunar ISRU architecture in which the Transfer Vehicle pushes the Lander Vehicle out of cislunar orbit and then returns to orbit in cislunar space. The Lander Vehicle descends to the lunar surface, lands, and later ascends to cislunar space to rendezvous with the transfer vehicle.

Pensado fell in love with the topic of human exploration architectures back in college, where he also delved into aerospace systems analysis and integrated architecture studies. After graduation, he spent some time in industry as a Mechanical Engineer before joining SMAB. Compiling a database on ISRU capability gap assessments was his first foray into that topic while at NASA, and that experience led Pensado to joining the STMD team for this wider ISRU study. Over time, his role on the team has grown from executing the code and calculations to assisting with the study formulation and co-authoring research papers and will include leading portions of the study in the future. “We have expanded a lot on how we can put together an architecture and study the sensitivities to it in a much more robust fashion that can be done quicker.”

How has this experience been? Pensado reports, “Beyond the technical aspects, my favorite part has been the collaboration, and the group dynamics in SMAB are pretty excellent, so that’s what makes these projects pretty entertaining.”

Author/Contact: Emily Judd
Published: October 2020

Take a look at other SMAB feature stories

Several United States government agencies utilize space to achieve their organizational goals, but how do these different organizations achieve mutual cooperation in space? We discuss this and more with SMAB analyst Gregory Benjamin. Credits: NASA.
What’s the right orbit for a satellite to provide the best science possible? We talk with SMAB engineer Vianni Ricano Cadenas about her work aiding the NASA Earth Science Division. Credits: NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
Tim Lewis is both a strategic and systems thinker. He doesn’t make decisions about engineering or science, but he is responsible for building a consensus that enables those decisions to be made.
What does it take to send astronauts to and from Mars? We discuss the challenges of designing a crewed Mars mission with SMAB engineer Patrick Chai, the lead of NASA Langley Research Center’s Mars Architecture Team. Credits: NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory.
Marie Ivanco, an aerospace engineer and decision science expert, explains how she tackles the challenges of designing new science mission architectures in a way that meets objectives from interested parties around the world. Credits: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
As the number of satellites in orbit grows, NASA needs to understand how they might collaborate to help answer big questions about space science. Aerospace engineer Ben Merrel talks about his work exploring the reliability and effectiveness of satellite constellations.
Astronauts will be staying for longer periods of time on the Moon. Melanie Grande has imagined a sustainable way to keep them safe while they're living and working there.
Chase Lynch is focused on helping to create crew timelines, particularly when it comes to maintaining the systems that make off-world living possible. Find out where he discovered a treasure-trove of maintenance data to help inform his work.