MIT News Office

MIT News Office

March 14, 2007

Space Logistics: MIT and JPL releaseSpaceNet 1.3

NASA has announced that humans will return to the Moon by 2020 as part of the new Vision for Space Exploration ( Unlike the Apollo (1969-1972) lunar landing missions, however, this time around the goal is to establish a long term human presence, potentially centered around a lunar outpost at the rim of Shackelton crater (Lunar South Pole).

Ensuring the feasibility and sustainability of such a campaign will require careful planning and the establishment of a reliable supply line from the Earth to the Moon. NASA has been funding MIT research to develop new frameworks and tools for addressing this challenge as an interplanetary supply chain.

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As part of the research MIT conducted an expedition to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2005 to study the challenges and requirements for supplying remote research outposts on Earth:

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On March 14, 2007 MIT released its SpaceNet software tool (v1.3) for modeling interplanetary supply chains. This software is the result of a two year $2.4 million effort to provide NASA with an integrated supply chain management capability for crewed space exploration missions. The project team consists of graduate students, postdocs and research staff and is led by Prof. Olivier de Weck (Aeronautics & Astronautics and ESD) and Prof. David Simchi-Levi (CEE and ESD). MIT’s partners are the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Dr. Robert Shishko), Payload Systems Inc. (Joe Parrish, President) and (in phase 1) United Space Alliance LLC (Andy Evans).

The term “supply chain” has traditionally been used to refer to terrestrial logistics and the flow of materials and finished goods in and out of manufacturing facilities, warehouses and retail stores. Improvements in service level as well as reduced transportation and inventory holding costs have been achieved in many organizations thanks to careful supply chain design, planning and optimization. Increasingly, there is a realization that crewed space missions, such as the sustainment of the International Space Station (ISS) or the buildup and use of a lunar outpost, should not be treated as isolated missions, but rather as an integrated supply chain. This will simultaneously (i) improve exploration capability and scientific return, (ii) minimize transportation costs and (iii) reduce risks through increased system availability and resilience to failures.

SpaceNet is an integrated interplanetary supply chain management and logistics planning and simulation software tool. The goal of SpaceNet is to allow mission architects, planners, systems engineers and logisticians to focus on what will be needed to support future crewed exploration missions, primarily in the Earth-Moon-Mars system. Instead of helping to design the elements (vehicles) themselves in terms of propulsive and pressurized/un-pressurized cargo carrying capability, SpaceNet evaluates such vehicles in the context of a particular mission architecture and supply chain strategy. The software allows the user to specify how the transportation and inventory holding capacity resulting from particular mission architectures will be used in terms of various classes of supply.

The most important classes of supply in space exploration are: consumables, spares and exploration items. SpaceNet allows simulating the time-varying flow of elements (vehicles), crew and supply items through the nodes and arcs (trajectories) of a supply network in space, while taking into account feasibility (Vs, fuel levels) as well as consumption and supply. One of the unique features of SpaceNet is that it supports not only single sortie-style missions but also detailed analysis of multi-year campaigns, where some items may be pre-positioned or re-supplied by one set of elements or crew while being used by other elements or crew. The emphasis is on ensuring logistical feasibility of a given scenario as well as a prediction of the resulting logistics measures of effectiveness (MOEs).

SpaceNet 1.3 is implemented in Matlab and exports its results directly to the user through a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and to spreadsheets that can be used for post-processing analysis. Both trade study mode (the comparison of two scenarios against each other) and batch mode (automatically varying parameters within one scenario) are supported.

< here insert statements from the NASA sponsor, Dr. Martin Steele,

More information about the project can be found at:

Aero-Astro Magazine 2006 Edition:

See separate files with figures etc.