New Horizons Design Reuse? |
New Horizons Design Reuse? |
Sep 22 2006, 05:04 PM
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8783 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, 05:19 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
IIRC, spacecraft from Mariners 6 through 10, and through to Pioneers 10 & 11 and Voyagers 1 & 2, used the same basic octagonal spacecraft bus as the "starting point" for their development. Yes, each iteration went through a great deal of redesign and change based on the given missions, but I seem to recall that each one started out with the same sized-and-shaped bus unit...
Please, someone verify this old man's fading memory...? -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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