| Abstract: | This paper extends traditional production/distribution system analysis to address raw material, factories, and markets located beyond Earth. It explains the eventual advantages of such operations and discusses likely sites in the solar system. It furnishes a typology for production/distribution systems, assessing the fit of each type to space operations. It briefly reviews the physics of orbits. It develops transportation and inventory cost functions for the simplest case of Hohmann trajectories, and for transportation between circular orbits of similar radii using higher‐energy trajectories. These cost functions are used to derive a model of production/distribution system cost, the minimization of which selects an optimal factory location. The paper suggests potential extensions to this work, and concludes with ideas for location research on the novel reaches of extraterrestrial space. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005. |
