The Escapade spacecraft are using Ariannespace supplied bipropellant engine 318 ISP & 397N. Pressure fed?Not Hypercurie that I assumed.
The MSR-SR will evaluate all 12 studies, but need not recommend a specific one as the best path forward for MSR. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be one of the proposed architectures. It may be that we learn things from all of the architectures,” he said. “They take those things, pieces of them, and say this is what we think the agency ought to be doing going forward.”The goal of the review is to provide that recommendation to agency leadership, including Administrator Bill Nelson, some time in December. “What we’re looking for is an architecture that gives us the highest likelihood of returning samples to Earth before 2040 and, if possible, for less than $11 billion,” Gramling said.
Quote from: TrevorMonty on 10/23/2024 04:57 pmThe Escapade spacecraft are using Ariannespace supplied bipropellant engine 318 ISP & 397N. Pressure fed?Not Hypercurie that I assumed.I think those are probably post deployment motors. Remember that there are two separate birds in Escapade, both of them deployed from the Photon Explorer, which uses either Curies or HyperCuries. I'd guess the latter, but I don't know.
The main propulsion engine is the S400-12 Biprop Thruster from Arianespace, which uses a combination of monomethylhydrazine (MMH) and dinitrogen tetroxide (NTO). Mandy said they weighed a number of factors when it came to choosing which components to build and which to procure, like the engines.“We looked at all the different options for engines that could get us [to Mars]. Rocket Lab has its own engines. We are more interested in mission success than anything else,” Mandy said. “There are these high heritage, very stable, long-duration mission engines that came out of other companies and we just picked one of those.”
Looks like RocketLab provided an all-RocketLab solution. The RocketLab Mars Telecommunication Orbiter (MTO) is not needed as existing satellites can provide this task. The RocketLab Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) is also not needed, as ESA is providing this task.
One does have to wonder how much of the budget is allocated for the ESA's ERO. There's probably a reason that even the "option 2" proposal which uses Starship as a lander costs at minimum $5.8B.
Rocket Lab has uploaded a new webpage outlining their Mars Sample Return mission plan, including renders of the various spacecraft involved. Notably, this version of the proposal includes three Neutron launches, one carrying a "Mars Telecommunications Orbiter." Why they can't use existing Mars orbiters, I don't know.https://www.rocketlabusa.com/missions/mars-sample-return/Edit: Some quick observations from the renders: it appears that their Mars Lander Vehicle uses eight smaller engines, while the Mars Ascent Vehicle uses one larger engine. If I didn't know better, I'd say the smaller engines are Curies and the larger one is a HyperCurie, but I suspect someone will come along shortly and tell me the thrusts would make no sense using those engines, so it's probably just what they had 3D models of lying around.
We can wait another year, or we can get started now.Our Mars Sample Return architecture will put Martian samples in the hands of scientists faster and more affordably. Less than $4 billion, with samples returned as early as 2031.This is not our first encounter with the Red Planet. The orbiters, rovers, landers, and helicopters of Mars all bear Rocket Lab’s fingerprints. We can deliver MSR mission success too.More: http://rocketlabusa.com/missions/mars-sample-return/
Or…a better 3rd option- Rocket Lab does it for billions less and years earlier using our proposed architecture.
With NASA stating hat the commercial option for the sample return costs 5.8 to 7 billions, can we infer that the Rocket Lab proposal is no longer considered for this mission? Or would the total costs to NASA somehow still reach 5.8 billions with the Rocket Lab part amounting to 4 billions?
The RocketLab Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) is also not needed, as ESA is providing this task.
Finally listened to this.The positives: for the uninitiated, it's a good overview of RocketLab capabilities, their MSR architecture in contrast w/ NASA plans, and the evolution of public-private partnership, esp. as it applies to science missions.The big negative: the RocketLab pitch still strikes me as highly misleading as far as comparative cost & schedule go, and they don't really unpack it.Lemme explain.The claim, repeated at several point throughout the segment is that NASA's MSR plans will cost $11B, while RocketLab is offering to do it for a firm fixed price of $4B, saving $7B that could be spent elsewhere. And that they can get the samples back faster.First, let's look at where that $11B estimate came from.In September 2023, an independent review board published a report estimating that the total cost of MSR would come out to between $8B and $11B. This estimate included money spent to date.NASA published a response in April 2024 [1] agreeing with this assessment before commissioning a line of studies to reduce cost and pull forward the timeline.As of the fall '23 report, Congress had appropriated $1.74B* [2]. A year and a half later, we are almost certainly looking at over $2B. (I thought this amount was ~$3B based on what I've heard, including from someone at JPL, and I've repeated this a number of times, so consider this a retraction.)In other words, $11B was the *upper* end of a $8-11B range that included what has now added up to ~$2B already spent on the program. Iow, the IRB & NASA estimate from ~a year ago is that the program cost going forward now would be ~$6-9B.After last year's studies, NASA has down-selected to two options, one of which they expect to cost $6.6-7.7B, the other $5.8-7.1B [3]. Assuming these are for money going forward and not total cost, they represent a very modest reduction in total estimated mission cost, from $8-11B to $7.8-10B.And what about the RocketLab proposal? With the $2+B already spent, we're looking at $6B *plus* whatever NASA centers spend going forward in support of the mission. It's frankly hard to imagine this being less than $1B, so I'd estimate $7-$8B in total.In other words, as best as I can tell the expected range of actual savings is somewhere between 0 and around $3 billion.And frankly, this isn't too surprising, because RocketLab is proposing to largely start from scratch (with little benefit from the $2B already spent or the European hardware we'd otherwise be getting for free) and develop a one-off system, factoring in profit margins and risk. If they pull this off with healthy margins, they'd still probably end up having done it 3-5x more efficiently than the traditional model, but this is a case where that's not enough to actually save the taxpayer nearly as much money as one might expect, if any.Consider also that the driver of projected MSR delays is an expectation of a low cap on funding levels. If you can't save money, it's not expected to go faster, even if you do have a team that could put something like this together in 3 years (which I don't believe even RocketLab is likely to be able to do).I personally don't consider any of these 3 options (the two from NASA and the one from RocketLab) to be dramatically and obviously better than the others, but more importantly, I don't consider any of them to be good enough. (I'll write separately about what I'd like to see the new NASA administration do with MSR.)Now, full disclosure: RKLB is a double digit % of my portfolio, and a contract of this size would be a huge boon for them that could triple their annual revenue (in 2023, they had 244M revenue, and 2024 will likely be a little over $400M) and send the stock soaring with a huge payoff for me.So I'm actively arguing against my personal financial interests when I say these things.PS: The assertion that commercial crew or commercial cargo were much more expensive than this is silly. Both had strictly smaller development budgets per provider than what RocketLab is asking for. Ditto for HLS.[1] https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/mirt-04152024-updated-signed.pdf?emrc=bacc28[2] https://rollcall.com/2024/02/16/mars-samples-project-looms-large-in-final-spending-talks/[3] https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/nasas-new-plans-for-returning-samples-from-mars/
