MSL Cost Caps and de-scoping - Sept '07 |
MSL Cost Caps and de-scoping - Sept '07 |
Sep 16 2007, 07:43 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 370 Joined: 12-September 05 From: France Member No.: 495 |
Very bad news.
It's certainly the best way to run the business of cost overruns but even if we are used to these kind of consequences, it's always sad to hear. NASA cuts LANL sampler from next Mars rover http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2007/09/...news/news02.txt Edit : And also... http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/sto...p;channel=space http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.rss.sp....html?pid=25415 ... removal of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) and the zoom capability on the mast camera... ... SAM and CheMin were cost-capped... |
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Sep 22 2007, 03:43 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 234 Joined: 8-May 05 Member No.: 381 |
"Making a cache almost guarantees funding for a mission to go fetch the cache."
Actually, I was looking at the opposite point of view, that a Mars sample return mission may never take place, due to its $2-3 billion cost, and the fact that there will always be a subgenre of the environmentalists who will say that even an infinitesmal risk of introducing Martian microbes to the Earth's biosphere is unacceptable under any circumstances (I am not one of those people, BTW). I remember many years ago when the baseline was for an unmanned Mars mission to return its sample to Earth orbit, then be brought aboard the space station for initial analysis and a long quarantine as a safety enhancement. Because of the obvious higher cost of that scenario, nobody talks about it anymore. (I even remember a proposal to return the sample to a manned lunar base). My point is that there will always be some opposition to an unmanned Mars sample return mission, and combined with the high price, it will be all too easy for policticians to keep pushing it off to the indefinite future. Putting a sample cache on MSL when there is no approved sample return mission could turn out to be a complete waste of precious weight and money the project obviously can't spare. |
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