New Horizons Design Reuse? Options

[nprev]

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.

[Jim from NSF.com]

NH was good only for this mission. It was a point solution. Using the spinning solid motor comprises the design. LRO and MRO benefit from using the 3-axis Centaur. There are better buses out there

[tedstryk]

NH was good only for this mission. It was a point solution. Using the spinning solid motor comprises the design. LRO and MRO benefit from using the 3-axis Centaur. There are better buses out there

The NH2 idea, which would have flown by Uranus during equinox, would have been well suited to the design, because it was a flyby and speed and simplicity were important. If there is an engineering model or something (and I don't think there is) that could be flight readied for a fly by Uranus or Neptune and one or more of these new KBOs, I would be for it. But I think it would be better to design something new than recreate NH, although there may be some heritage. NH was affected by the need to get to Pluto in a hurry before the possible freezing out of the atmosphere for ~200 years and the loss of more territory to darkness as it moves away from its 1980s equinox. It is the only mission I can think of in which haste was so much of a factor.