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, 05:43 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2542 Joined: 13-September 05 Member No.: 497 |
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. This idea surfaces every few months. Unfortunately, unless you are flying very similar missions and payloads and builidng a fair number of spacecraft (at least 5 or 10, at a guess) there are few economies of scale the way spacecraft are typically built. (You have to get into dozens or hundreds before they really kick in; Motorola did some interesting things for the Iridium constellation, for example.) Design commonaliity is usually at the box or subsystem level; there is little savings to be had for spacecraft structure, since structure is fairly easy to redesign. For example, there's a lot of commonality between Mars Odyssey, Stardust, and Genesis, even though they are pretty different missions. And you'll forgive me for being opposed to give APL and the NH team a monopoly on building hardware to explore the outer solar system, much as I'm sure they would like that. -------------------- Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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