NASA Builds a Cheap Standardized Space Probe 123
TangAddict writes "Dr. Alan Weston, who previously invented bungee jumping, led a team of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center to build a $4 million spacecraft in less than two years. The Modular Common Spacecraft Bus is designed to accept payloads of up to 50kg. and can be used for a variety of missions including a rendezvous with asteroids, orbiting Earth or Mars, and landing on the moon. When NASA officials saw the first flight test, they offered Weston and his team $80 million to use their design for the LADEE mission, which will gather dust and atmosphere samples from the moon in 2011."
Finally using some common sense (Score:3, Interesting)
If only this "lets make the best with what we have while someone else tries to get us more" approach would filter through to more government bodies/groups.
NASA cutting costs? Hardly. (Score:5, Interesting)
This, of course, is crazy. If they were to demand blueprints from the contractor for the first model of a particular spacecraft and then make those blueprints available to the general public then, the next time they want to contract for a similar spacecraft, they'll find there are a whole mess of companies lining up to bid.. and to bid very low indeed - as they don't have to spend all that money designing a basic spacecraft - they don't have to re-invent the wheel.
As the bids are so much lower, NASA could then start asking for more capable spacecraft.. and quickly a publicly owned repository of blueprints would be built up that all the various contractors could work with.
But instead, we get million dollar spacecraft from the same 3 contractors, over and over again. No standardization, no spin-offs for other purposes.
Re:$4 million to make it work... (Score:2, Interesting)
How funny. USSR AND America did have the same group of key ppl; the Germans from WWII. The difference is that USSR forced most of theirs to work as outsiders, while in the US, ALL choose to be American citizens. Big difference there.
With that said, I agree with your first statement. The USSR owns the majority of the firsts. Of course, none of it was by much. In fact, USSR took numerous shortcuts so that they could beat America.
No Payload, No Spacecraft (Score:5, Interesting)
A common satellite bus is a good thing, but it does not constitute a viable spacecraft. Like a transit bus that never carries passengers, it serves no useful purpose. The payload has always been the driving element in any satellite or probe, in schedule, budget and trade-offs. And rightfully so IMHO. I believe that's why a common bus hasn't been succesful in the past. Both NASA and the DoD have tried, but the needs of the payload outweigh the needs of the bus.
The Space Ground Link System, SGLS (note to self: submit wikipedia page in copious spare time) is analagous to a common satellite bus protocol at the physical to network layers and provides some commonality of bus structure for DoD satellites. The upper protocol layers vary but the foundation is the same.
Ask anyone who's worked in the essential, but unglamorous world of satellite control. Their biggest problem is upgrading the control network quickly enough to satisfy all the new requirements of the next big launch. New datalink frequencies, stronger encryption, faster throughput rates, etc. All the while, they have to maintain the capability to control and pamper the oldest bird flying and monitor everything in between.
It's not a bad thing that satellites outlive their design life, but it has to be considered when operating and budgeting for the control network.
Its actually all been done before. (Score:5, Interesting)
At least by 1990, NASA, DOD and Fairchild/Orbital used to run a system called "Multi Mission Modular Satellite".
So what have they done? For 4 million they built a prototype that will never work in space? Notice that when they were added to some other project the total real project price was $80M - and I'm not so sure that includes launch vehicle (ie the rocket).
Back in the day, the radio receiver (arguably the most critical part of a satellite) was $2 million all by itself. It had to be radiation hardened (cosmic rays) and work flawlessly for 5+ years. If something really went wrong, the receiver would send the pulses that actually re-booted or reset the other on board computers.
Also satellites that have instruments, like the hubble, need to point very precisely at stars - the instruments to do this are very expensive, the controls that orient the satellites are relatively cheap - but you have to buy extra (redundancy).
Imagine this, the Hubble Space Telescope has to point at a spot in space for long time - once for 1 million seconds ( Hubble Site [hubblesite.org]) During that period of time, the solar arrays, antennas etc. couldn't move because even the ultra smooth stepper motors they use would have shaken the spacecraft enough to blur the image.
That being said, there are 100s, if not 1000s of neat little projects that potentially save NASA money - like using standard Internet protocols to talk to spacecraft (tweak the timeouts a bit) - which would mean ground stations would use pretty much standard router hardware vs. custom stuff. It good to see some of these ideas get the exposure they deserve.
However, most satellites are designed with requirements for the instrumentation. The rest of the satellite is designed around those requirements. Unless you have a very flexible design in your spacecraft bus, the scientific part of the mission might be compromised.
So this lander might work - how many g's on impact? (err... landing). What is the success chance? Do I take my $50million instrument and put it on a $10 million lander that has a 30% chance of success? Or do I build a $20 million lander that has an 80% chance? or a $30 Million that has 95% chance? If I pick wrong, I'm sure that I will not get another $100 million to fly the mission again. Perhaps a lifetime of research goes down the toilet...
what id gas cost $100,000 per galon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now imagine that gas cost not $4 per galon but $100,000 per galon. At that price it would be worth building a special car for every trip and then throwing the car away after just one trip. This is what NASA does because the operational and luach cost is so much higher than any other cost
NASA also works off a fix mass budget. If the bus is 1 pound to heavy that means one pound less fuel can be loaded which translates into reduced lifetime in space or maybe the one pound saved could be used in improve an instrument.
In effect NASA is payinf more then $100K per galon for gas. I think it costs about a million dollors a mile to get to space, at those prices it pays to custom design each spacecraft to it s optimized for each mission