The effect of service life of the nuclear power plant of a reusable electrically-propelled orbital transfer vehicle on the cost of transporting a unit of payload mass

For the purposes of early stages of engineering design, an algorithm was developed for evaluating the effect of extending the life of a nuclear power plant from substantiated 5 years to predicted 10 years on the economic efficiency of a reusable orbital transfer vehicle based on nuclear-powered electrical propulsion when supporting heavy cargo traffic from Earth to a lunar orbit. The work to extend the life of the nuclear power plant will result in an increased cost of the power plant manufacturing, as well as in the increased costs of development of the nuclear power plant and the orbital transfer vehicle as a whole. In the model the R&D costs are estimated at 10 to 20 times the cost of the power plant manufacturing and are provided as a single value combining the R&D for both nuclear power plant and the orbital transfer vehicle as a whole. The model factors in the non-linear increase in the research costs as a function of the achieved life of the nuclear power plant. The nuclear power plant manufacturing costs will have an insignificant growth with increase in life. It was established that an increase in the nuclear power plant life and thus in the orbital transfer vehicle life from 5 to 10 years results not in the expected decrease, but rather in a certain increase in the unit cost of payload transportation by 4-7% depending on the R&D cost estimate (to the amount of 10 or 20 times the cost of power plant manufacturing) and in the rate of their increase as the life extends (by 5-10% for each additional year).