Dec 4th News Conference |
Dec 4th News Conference |
Dec 3 2008, 08:58 PM
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#1
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14432 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/dec/H...MSL_Update.html
From the wording of this announcement, MSL is clearly still on, which is a good thing. We'll have to wait and see. Doug |
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Dec 6 2008, 05:17 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
At the risk of continuing this divergence in the thread, I'll point out that extended mission ops are the cheapest portion of a planetary mission. The biggest costs are for the DSN time to get the data back to Earth. The remaining costs are mostly for the manpower -- the salaries and benefits of the teams working the missions. And in the case of the MERs, many of those are only working part-time on Oppy and Spirit, spending much of their time on MSL and other projects, as well. (Amortized costs of things like the computers used by the MER teams, the office space they take up, etc., are really pretty irrelevant, after all; it's not like they buy new equipment and rent new facilities for each mission extension. Those capital investments have long since been paid for and depreciated in the bookkeeping.)
Extended ops are the biggest "bang for the buck" you can get out of these things, and NASA has been pretty good about avoiding the penny-wise, pound-foolish approach of cutting $10 million from extended ops to try and make up a $400 million shortfall elsewhere. They're more likely to delay or cancel whole programs before they start racking up their major design and construction costs than they are to cut off assets already in place. That said, there may be pressure to cut back on Spirit operations if she continues to be power-starved and barely mobile. I don't foresee a project shutdown for Spirit, but you have to admit, we're not getting a huge amount of science data from her recently. Then again, we're not spending nearly as much time (and therefore money) on her as we are on Oppy, either. -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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