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, 05:29 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 220 Joined: 13-October 05 Member No.: 528 |
Mariner 4, 6,7, and 9 had a very similar bus, and was in a real sense a design evolution.
The Viking 1 and 2 carried on this design. On the other hand, Pioneer 10 and 11 had the Pioneer more for polital reasons than actual design lineage to Pioneers 6-9. It was felt at the time that calling the Jupiter mission "Pioneer" it would look more like a continuation of an existing program at Ames than an entirely new mission. It was true that AMES had a lot of experience building spin stabalized spacecraft, but there wasn't a lot of common hardware between the Solar Probes and the Jupiter missions. Mariner Jupiter-Saturn (the original name of Voyager) did much the same thing. It was sold partially by using the argument: Hey, same name, same orthagonal bus, it's just a follow on to Mariner.... and not in the same league as that expensive TOPS mission that Nixon just canned. |
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