Deep Space Boosters

Accelerating a spacecraft on its trajectory is not an easy task. I named the process as Space Rendezvous. I want to clarify it further.

When the exploration phase of a mission is complete, the humans and the samples would be transferred to a spaceship orbiting the source planet. Trajectory injector rockets would than put the spaceship into target planets trajectory by accelerating the spaceship to escape velocity of the source planet. After these boosters are consumed, the spaceship starts to decelerate due to gravity of the source planet.

Spaceship when considerably slowed down and moved away from the source planet can receive boosters to speed up the journey to the target planet. Spaceship can only receive one speed boost on its journey. It would be almost impossible to strap boosters to a fast-moving spaceship. As a result, depending on the distance, multiple boosters would be assembled before the rendezvous with the spaceship. The booster would have multiple propellant tanks and few engines (for redundancy). The booster does not need to overcome any gravity. Therefore, the engines do not need to generate high thrust. Instead, they need to be efficient. There would be multiple propellant tanks that would be ejected as they are consumed. However, the engines would stay until all the fuel is consumed. This would be possible by strapping the booster to the spaceship on its side. Due to deep space travel, there is no aerodynamic consideration.

As the spaceship approaches the target planet, it would accelerate further by the gravity of the planet. In order to slow down the spaceship, it’s trajectory would be adjusted to overshoot the planet and use its gravity to slow down the rocket. Afterwards, Spaceship settles into an orbit around the planet. There, Planetary Transfer Module would transfer the humans and the samples to the target planet’s surface.