Even if the launch vehicle were free a New Frontiers mission is still quite expensive. The difference in cost between launch providers is something like less than ten percentage points of the total cost of the mission when all is said and done. So while it's nice that cheaper launch costs are on the way it's not a game changing thing for these missions.
Quote from: notsorandom on 12/25/2017 04:27 pmEven if the launch vehicle were free a New Frontiers mission is still quite expensive. The difference in cost between launch providers is something like less than ten percentage points of the total cost of the mission when all is said and done. So while it's nice that cheaper launch costs are on the way it's not a game changing thing for these missions.The PI cost limit for this competition is $850M, which includes design, build, and testing of the hardware and software as well as the analysis of the returned data. NASA separately pays for its management costs, launch, and operations. The latter two vary by mission (but note, both the finalists have very long prime missions; Dragonfly might operate for a decade or so in extended missions). In looking at the actual full costs of prior New Frontiers missions, the NASA costs can be $200M or more than the PI costs. So notsorandom is correct, even a free launch wouldn't dramatically change the economics of these missions. However, a $100M here, $30M saved there using less expensive launches eventually adds up to enough money for a new mission (but it might not be planetary and Congress might just reduce the budget allocation).The long flight times of these missions is one reason that I don't think we'll see billionaires investing in them, as much as I'd like to see that (but there is that group trying to fund a private Enceladus mission). How old would Musk or Bezos be, for example, before any of these missions returned their primary data?
What happens if the finalist in NF-4 for whatever reasons fails to be ready for launch on time?
Thus the news that Dragonfly has won approval as a finalist concept for a robotic launch to Titan in the mid-2020s is encouraging. Dragonfly offers not just a useful instrument package but mobility on the surface in the form of a rotorcraft that could explore numerous sites on the moon. We have to be creative indeed in imagining life that would exist at -180 degrees Celsius in an environment that gets a tenth of one percent of the sunlight Earth’s surface receives. But as Rahm, Lunine and colleagues have reminded us, mechanisms may exist to make it happen.
@BlackstarWhat happens if the finalist in NF-4 for whatever reasons fails to be ready for launch on time?Will they get more funding, just get cancel or something else.
Article somewhat countering the insinuations of certain posters about if this mission could do much useful science.Quote Thus the news that Dragonfly has won approval as a finalist concept for a robotic launch to Titan in the mid-2020s is encouraging. Dragonfly offers not just a useful instrument package but mobility on the surface in the form of a rotorcraft that could explore numerous sites on the moon. We have to be creative indeed in imagining life that would exist at -180 degrees Celsius in an environment that gets a tenth of one percent of the sunlight Earth’s surface receives. But as Rahm, Lunine and colleagues have reminded us, mechanisms may exist to make it happen.https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=39019
Quote from: Star One on 12/27/2017 07:30 pmArticle somewhat countering the insinuations of certain posters about if this mission could do much useful science.Quote Thus the news that Dragonfly has won approval as a finalist concept for a robotic launch to Titan in the mid-2020s is encouraging. Dragonfly offers not just a useful instrument package but mobility on the surface in the form of a rotorcraft that could explore numerous sites on the moon. We have to be creative indeed in imagining life that would exist at -180 degrees Celsius in an environment that gets a tenth of one percent of the sunlight Earth’s surface receives. But as Rahm, Lunine and colleagues have reminded us, mechanisms may exist to make it happen.https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=39019There's a good reason that the ultimate goal for almost every type of solar system body is to return samples to Earth. The exquisite and varied investigations that can be done on a returned sample can never be matched by instruments on a spacecraft. Every grain can tell its own unique story. However, a planetary program that just returns samples without any other type of mission would be highly unbalanced. Imagine if the only goal was to have a piece of Mars in a terrestrial laboratory -- we'd be done (I even own a tiny fragment of a Martian meteorite). Imagine trying to understand Mars without the orbital missions to provide the planetary and regional contexts, or without landers and rovers to provide local context. If we had rushed to a Mars sample return 20 or 30 years ago (and it's been the ultimate goal of Martian exploration for that long), we'd have picked the wrong samples and not understood their place in time or history.Sample return missions are also usually more expensive than orbiters and landers/rovers. So do we wait on further exploration of, for example, Ceres until we have the budget wedge for a sample return or do we return with a less expensive lander whose instruments will advance our understanding of the surface materials but nowhere near as much as could be done with returned samples?Dragonfly takes Titan exploration to the second level (with Cassini having provided the global and regional contexts (albeit at low resolutions compared to our mapping of Mars, the moon, or even Venus)). Depending on what it finds, getting samples back from Titan may be the absolute must do of the 2040s.The real challenge is not designing a balanced program but of affording it. Standard planetary budgets can pay for one Flagship mission, around 1.5 New Frontiers, and 3-4 Discovery missions per decade. (We get two Flagship missions this coming decade because Congressman Culberson has pushed extra money into NASA's coffers earmarked for the Europa Clipper.) And so NASA may bet either taking the exploration of Titan or returning samples from a comet as its only New Frontiers mission for the 2020s.
If you read the recent National Academies report "Powering Science," you'll see that we noted that NASA has gotten a lot better at both estimating costs and managing missions to cost. But there can always be unpredictable development that crop up and require more money or harsh management decisions:https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24857/powering-science-nasas-large-strategic-science-missions
The latter two vary by mission (but note, both the finalists have very long prime missions; Dragonfly might operate for a decade or so in extended missions).
1-NASA had a near crisis of cost overruns in the 1990s and 2000s in the planetary missions (see, for example, http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2013/05/implementing-missions-within-budget.html). The people running its program are smart and have seemingly largely fixed the problem, although surprises still happen such as with InSight. 2-With Juno's early funding problems, the team had an extended definition and design phase. It's PI has remarked on how much that helped mature the design and avoid later cost overruns. Clipper also had an extended definition phase -- so far, I'm not hearing of major cost problems on this very complex mission.
Quote from: vjkane on 12/28/2017 03:18 pm1-NASA had a near crisis of cost overruns in the 1990s and 2000s in the planetary missions (see, for example, http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2013/05/implementing-missions-within-budget.html). The people running its program are smart and have seemingly largely fixed the problem, although surprises still happen such as with InSight. 2-With Juno's early funding problems, the team had an extended definition and design phase. It's PI has remarked on how much that helped mature the design and avoid later cost overruns. Clipper also had an extended definition phase -- so far, I'm not hearing of major cost problems on this very complex mission.1-The more relevant issue was JWST in the 2000s, along with Curiosity/MSL. JWST sent such a shock through the system that it forced everybody to do things differently. See chapter 3 of the "Powering Science" report which goes into the issue in some detail. There are a lot of management techniques that were implemented to keep a better handle on costs. For instance, one issue is where the budget reserves are held. Previously most of the reserves were in the project level, meaning that when stuff started to cost more, the manager simply spent the money. But by shifting the reserves to a higher level, it meant that when stuff started to cost more, the manager now had to go to HQ and ask permission to spend money. This forces managers to try to solve problems without having to ask for cash. It reduces cost overruns.2-Somebody could probably go into this in more detail. I think that the screw-up with Juno early on cost something like $100 million, which was a big hit (almost 20% of the budget?). Now they did have an extended definition phase that might have saved money later on, but it may not have saved them as much as it cost up front. The bottom line of the Juno experience is that NASA learned the hard way that it should not choose a mission unless it has the money to pay for that mission. (They did an even bigger screw up with an earlier Discovery selection. They definitely learned some lessons in the 2000s that they have applied later on.)
If you click through on the link I provided, you'll see that Discovery missions regularly went over budget, too.
Two popular categories of proposals from the last competition may not be in this new one. With JAXA's Phobos sample return/Deimos multiple flyby MMX mission, these two destinations would seem to be out of the running. From an OPAG presentation this past summer, the outer planets community appears to have concluded that Discovery missions to those destinations don't fit within the budget cap. I expect retries for Venus and more comet and asteroid proposals. Not sure if a meaningful Ceres follow on mission can fit within the budget cap, but there are those main belt comets... And I expect more Mars proposals. The Next Mars Orbiter SDT identified several priority orbital studies, and the Mars community is making noise about stationary landers for sites with current water or ice (with attention to planetary protection) or small rovers to explore the diversity of ancient aqueous sites.
This discussion properly belongs in a Discovery thread, but you left out a big category: lunar missions. There were relatively few the last Discovery round, but I would expect more proposals for the next round. There are some interesting reasons for that, but it really belongs in a different thread.
I assume that's why there's no Ocean Worlds program in New Frontiers.Oh wait...
Here’s something from Pg 453, Vol 59 December 2017 issue of Spaceflight magazine that I rather agree with. My bolding.“NASA is locked into the Decadal Survey published every ten years by the National Research Council, which while an admirable coalition of multifarious proposals, is too inflexible to absorb discoveries made by missions recommended by the preceding survey. Findings about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, their liquid subsurface oceans, and the way they interact with each other and their parent planet, failed to factor in to the most recent survey in 2013, prepared in the preceding years.”