Concept for accelerated development of a standardized transportation module based on electric thruster KM-10

The paper presents a concept for an accelerated two-phase development project of a standardized transportation module based on the Hall-type electric thruster KM-10, that is capable of operating in various voltage and power throttle ratio modes. During the first phase, an existing satellite bus is outfitted with two KM-10 electric thrusters to build a small-scale prototype of a transportation module with ~15 kW of power available for conducting a space experiment. During the second phase the prototype is upgraded by adding more thrusters and replacing the standard solar arrays of the satellite bus with new, more powerful flexible solar arrays that had been proven in the space experiment, to construct a standardized transportation module that has ~50 kW of power available for electric propulsion that is capable of effectively addressing a broad range of tasks in near-Earth space. It is demonstrated that such a module used together with medium and heavy launch vehicles can provide a significantly lower unit cost of payload delivery to a circumlunar orbit as compared with conventional liquid-propellant based vehicles.