New Horizons Design Reuse? |
New Horizons Design Reuse? |
Sep 22 2006, 05:04 PM
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8785 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
Hopefully this thread is located in the right place...if not, my apologies, Doug.
It occurs to me that one of the fundamental problems with UMSF from a funding/project management perspective is that each spacecraft is usually unique, which pretty much zaps any savings that might be realized via economies of scale. It would sure be nice to drive down costs & fly more missions. Of course, each spacecraft usually HAS to be a little--or a lot--different in terms of payload in order to answer the investigative questions that justify the mission. However, why don't we at least standardize the spacecraft bus for specific classes of missions? For example, the NH design should prove to be an extremely robust outer system platform for flyby/orbital operations anywhere at or beyond the orbit of Jupiter. If we could produce, say, twenty NH busses for use over the next twenty years or so, then the payload design would be driven in part by a fixed set of interfaces, thus simplifying systems engineering considerably, decreasing lead-time, and therefore enabling far better long-term mission planning. Also, we could always go to Congress during hard times & say something like "we built all these NH clones...it would be a shame not to use them" (an old DoD trick)...and then we'd have orbiters for all four of the gas giants, plus lots of other cool things.... This sort of schema would also provide a rapid-response capability for new discoveries or unique events. For example, let's say that another comet like Shoemaker-Levy 9 was found that was gonna crash into Saturn or pass through its ring system in about ten years. A standard outer-planet bus could conceivably allow us to fly a mission on short notice, provided that other circumstances like launch window/trajectory availability are favorable. -------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Sep 22 2006, 05:23 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 220 Joined: 13-October 05 Member No.: 528 |
I'll start by saying I think your idea has some meritous points. I don't know about making 20 of the things, but there are some advantages to reusing the design.
Alas, that has already been proposed and rejected. The APL team pushed for a New Horizons 2, to be built almost exactly identical to the first vehicle (instruments included) and send it on a trajectory to one of the largest Kuiper Belt objects and do a flyby of Uranus on the way. They pushed the mission mainly on 3 points: - NH 1 will only see Pluto, and possibly one more random "Kuiper object of opportunity" in it's mission. By flying NH 2 you could be sure of seeing another few specific high interest targets. - Uranus has been visited only once. Here is a chance for a flyby with modern instrumentation - It would only cost half as much as NH 1. Congress directed that a study be made on the proposal. The study's conculsions (many disputed by APL) was that the cost would actually be more like 70-80% the cost of NH 1 (I don't remember the number). Their point was that all you saved in building a copy was the initial design cycles. All the hardware would have to be procured again, and assembled, tested, and launched. None of those phases are cheap, and in fact represent a very high percentage cost of a mission. Additionally, the mission was propsed for 2008, and frankly their isn't a lot of plutonium available to put into an RPG right now. And there were other higher priority missions and programs competing for the funds, to fly missions to places that we already had been and wanted to do a follow up. The Kuiper belt hadn't been seen yet, so many people advocated waiting for NH 1 results before planning a follow up. Plus, with a short lead time (aka... start spending money NOW) it was a near impossibility that NASA could find the money lying around someplace. So.... politically the idea might be dead. But even so, I myself expect to see at least one New Fronteirs #3 proposal from APL suggesting a re-use of the NH 1 design for some other outer solar system mission. The basic design seems like it lends itself nicely to a Neptune flyby (with probe?), or a Jupiter orbiter (with suitable propulsion module). There may be no practical way to fly the proposed NH 2 for the 350 million they claimed, but New Frontiers #3 will have a budget somewhere over 700 million. And with a likely launch date someplace around 2015-2016, the plutonium problem has the possibility of being solved. Now... if I could just wish for it, I would love to see a program adopted using several copies of the NH 1 design for a series of outer planets missions, launched every 2 years. Sadly, I didn't get a pony for my 5th birthday, and I don't think I'm likely to get this wish either... but still, it's nice to dream about it. |
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