[X] My Assistant

[lyford]

Can one paraphrase the quip about the "Holy Roman Empire" being neither holy, Roman nor an empire regarding this plan?

The idea, if I understood correctly, was this: By designing cheaper missions, NASA could launch more, and afford to lose a few more. The BIG MISSIONS were too expensive and put all the eggs in one basket. Why take a chance on any single failure points that could risk a program after bagillions of dollars were spent, such as Galileo's hi gain antenna?

Was this strategy successful?

To this outsider, it appeared that Dan Goldin drank too much of the 90's cyber-revolution kool aid and got swept up with the "irrational exuberance" of the dot.com boom. Everything will be possible and cheap in the digital age! Moore's Law notwithstanding, hi tech is only one piece of the puzzle when pulling off a successful interplanetary mission.

My opinion is that there is a baseline cost of doing business in space, even if sensors get smaller and cheaper, due to human support, testing, launch costs, etc. Even the "tech" components all have to be space rated, which is not the kind of consumer level mass production ultra cheap type tech with which most people are familiar. (I have had more than one conversation about why JPL couldn't have had bolted a cheap color digital camera on MER.....)

While adopting this plan may have allowed some missions that might not have seen the light of day before, each little failure seemed to hit NASA with more bad PR than the little successes could offset....

SO -

"Better Faster Cheaper : Golden Egg or Goldin's Goose?"

I would value all opinions, especially from those inside the org, natch.

[dvandorn]

The problem is that FBC broke down well-funded multi-billion dollar missions into several quarter-billion-dollar missions. And while it may seem to be less of a PR disaster to lose a quarter-billion-dollar mission than a three-billion-dollar mission, people don't have long memories. And losing a quarter of a billion dollars worth of planetary probe sticks in the public's craw as a waste of money, regardless of the fact that the money has paid for continuing growth and expertise within the aerospace community, and is mostly spent back into the economy by the engineers, workmen and companies involved in the project.

The MERs are a good example of a mission that was well-enough funded but mounted just a little *too* fast. Most of those involved in the design, testing and fabrication of the MERs and their various systems have gone on record saying that they worked themselves into the ground getting ready for the launch date, and really could have used another year to prepare. Steve Squyres said outright that one of the most important lessons learned was that, even though they were lucky and no major problems surfaced during the flight, the MER development schedule should *not* be taken as a baseline for planning future missions.

-the other Doug