Fast rendezvous profile evolution: From ISS to lunar station.

Recently, the fast rendezvous profile trend is observed in the manned spaceflight domain. Since 2012, docking of 28 Russian vehicles (18 of them were Soyuz crew vehicles) has been accomplished using the 6-h and 4-orbit rendezvous profile. The heritage and the return of experience from those flights made possible to develop and implement a two-orbit rendezvous with an unmanned Progress vehicle in 2018 that demonstrated the feasibility to develop and fly a fast rendezvous with Soyuz in 2020. The fast rendezvous profile will bring the crew vehicle to docking point in just 3 h after the insertion into orbit. Furthermore, in the future an ultrafast (one-orbit) rendezvous profile is considered as well. Crew comfort on the way to the ISS is just one of the advantages of the fast rendezvous profile which will also be required to develop the double-launch approach for the transfer to a lunar station. Since the double-launch approach considers separate launches of the crew vehicle and the upper stage, this allows arranging an effective traffic toward the Moon using launch vehicles of lower capacity. Launches at different times will allow the crew vehicle to wait for a successful launch of the upper stage while being docked to the orbital station, and that will give much higher reliability of the double-launch scenario. In the future, double-launch scenarios which include visiting an orbital station could be applied to reusable spacecraft transit from the orbital station to the lunar station and back. Fast rendezvous is especially favorable for double-launch scenarios because of the upper stage's limited lifetime if fueled with low boiling point propellant components. The paper reviews the evolution of the fast rendezvous profiles which were initially used in the ISS program for further utilization of this experience for development of rendezvous concepts in double-launch scenarios for missions to a lunar station. • A retrospective experience of double-launch approach, since Gemini program is considered. • An evolution of fast rendezvous profiles implemented during Soyuz spacecraft flights to the ISS is considered. • A fast rendezvous profile with using a near-earth orbital station for a double-launch scenario of flight to the Moon is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]