There is a lot of interest in lunar landing missions for both scientific exploration and commercial purposes. Commercial applications might include mining helium-3 for future nuclear fusion power plants on earth and mining water for rocket fuel.

The Spacecraft Control Toolbox makes it easy to do preliminary planning for lunar missions. In this blog we present a single MATLAB script that takes a spacecraft from a low Earth parking orbit to the lunar surface! Here is the final segment, the descent to the moon.

We ended up with a 30 kg dry mass for a spacecraft that can use an ECAPS 220 N HPGP thruster for delta-v.

The published script can be found here:

Lunar Mission Planning as a published MATLAB script

You can also send us an email to find out more about our Lunar Mission Design Tools.