Author Topic: Why so few small planetary exploration missions prior to the '90s?  (Read 12724 times)

Offline Blackstar

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So something based around the reliable and relative available Delta II made sense.

Good point. I'd add that Delta II got booked for a block buy for GPS launchers, which meant that they were going to be produced in relatively high numbers and the USAF was covering the infrastructure costs. That made Delta II available and cheap.

Offline GClark

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Someone mentioned Goddards' Planetary Explorer proposal.  There is a fairly good (though not particularly detailed) write-up of this in chapter 2 of Pioneering Venus.

The authors also discuss how it migrated from Goddard to Ames.

Offline Blackstar

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There is a woman who is writing a history of the Discovery program under NASA contract. I do not know the anticipated publication date, but NASA currently has a huge backlog for its history books, so it could be years before the history gets published.

Discovery has been an interesting program, very successful. It seems to be going strong. If anything, the problem is that NASA is not funding enough of them. There were 28 mission proposals during the last round, with three selected for further study and three selected for technology development. It is feasible that there were several others that were viable, but fell short in some way.

As to the program's history, there are certainly some interesting aspects. Lunar Prospector, the first Discovery mission, is certainly one. The politics behind that are undoubtedly fascinating. Another interesting aspect is the influence of faster, better, cheaper. And although it won't interest the general reader, I'd like to know about what happened when NASA (in 2005?) announced a Discovery competition and then failed to select a mission due to budget shortages. The story that I've heard is that NASA HQ screwed up when they did not set aside sufficient funding for the program. The other story that I've heard is that NASA HQ then implied--or at least did not refute the rumor--that there were no proposals that were selectable. This really annoyed a lot of people in the science community because it seemed like NASA HQ was blaming their budgeting mistake on the scientists.

Offline Jim

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As to the program's history, there are certainly some interesting aspects. Lunar Prospector, the first Discovery mission, is certainly one.

The PI was a real A-hole is what I take from reading his book

Offline as58

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As to the program's history, there are certainly some interesting aspects. Lunar Prospector, the first Discovery mission, is certainly one.

The PI was a real A-hole is what I take from reading his book

I once tried to read that book, but couldn't get much past 300 pages (so just over a quarter of its 1200 pages). It was one of the strangest books I've ever (tried to) read. And yes, it's easy to reach the same conclusion as Jim.

Offline Archibald

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Someone mentioned Goddards' Planetary Explorer proposal.  There is a fairly good (though not particularly detailed) write-up of this in chapter 2 of Pioneering Venus.

The authors also discuss how it migrated from Goddard to Ames.


Thank you very much !

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The PI was a real A-hole is what I take from reading his book

I once tried to read that book, but couldn't get much past 300 pages (so just over a quarter of its 1200 pages). It was one of the strangest books I've ever (tried to) read. And yes, it's easy to reach the same conclusion as Jim.

Is that our man ?

Quote
Lunar Prospector was managed out of NASA Ames Research Center with the prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The Principal Investigator for the mission was Dr. Alan Binder.
His personal account of the mission Against all Odds is highly critical of the bureaucracy of NASA overall, and of its contractors.[2]


(forgot the last sentence, pure wikipedia - biased and silly.)
« Last Edit: 12/03/2011 10:40 am by Archibald »
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline as58

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Quote
Lunar Prospector was managed out of NASA Ames Research Center with the prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The Principal Investigator for the mission was Dr. Alan Binder.
His personal account of the mission Against all Odds is highly critical of the bureaucracy of NASA overall, and of its contractors.[2]


(forgot the last sentence, pure wikipedia - biased and silly.)

Yes, that's the book. The Amazon review by Jason Barnes sums up very well what the book is like:

http://www.amazon.com/Lunar-Prospector-Against-All-Odds/product-reviews/1928771319/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

I guess the other reviewers must've read some entirely different book, in my opinion this one is as far from a "page-turner" as a book can be.

Offline Blackstar

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I haven't read it, but took a quick skim. I got the impression that he wrote nasty stuff about everybody, including people who obviously helped make the mission happen and whom he should be thanking.

All you really need to know is that it was probably the smallest planetary mission ever flown, and yet the guy felt compelled to write a 1000-page book about it...


Offline Archibald

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I assumed that it sort of happened over time, with decisions on individual programs as they came along--or as a side effect to not having sufficient money to do multiple projects at multiple centers.

I found more elements. There was an earlier atempt at Planetary Observers / Discovery, long before 1980.

Goddard did an atempt at low cost probes based on its Explorers satellites circa 1971. Being overloaded with satellite work they passed the projects to Ames, and that become another Pioneer - Pioneer Venus, and did not went farther than that one.

What surprised me is how discretely did Ames got out of the planetary probe business. The JPL de facto monopoly provoked little reactions - even Ames do not appear to have fought the decision bitterly. They were aparently given helicopter research, plenty of it, as a compensation, and that was it.


After so much time I just realized why Ames protested little when losing Pioneer.
Director of Ames at the times was... Hans Mark !
Hans Mark, the great shuttle supporter; Hans Mark that, in 1981, wanted to wipe out the planetary program.
So Hans Mark is (indirectly) responsible of JPL monopoly, since he didn't fought for his Pioneer program.

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Goddard did an atempt at low cost probes based on its Explorers satellites circa 1971. Being overloaded with satellite work they passed the projects to Ames, and that become another Pioneer - Pioneer Venus, and did not went farther than that one.

circling the wagons: had Hans Mark supported Pioneer-Venus a little more, that probe could have become a "Discovery-class" 20 years in advance. Discovery-class was created as a low-end to JPL expensive "space Cadillacs"... themselves the result of JPL monopoly, a consequence of Ames loss of Pioneer.

How about that ?

It also means that Mark is also twice responsible for Galileo issues - not only because of his "shuttle obsession" but also because Galileo had been given to Ames (his laboratory, thus a Pioneer), but he let it go to JPL... where it become a complicated Pioneer / Mariner hybrid, spun / despun.
« Last Edit: 04/15/2013 07:52 am by Archibald »
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline Bob Shaw

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I've always been struck by the difference between the approaches by different nations to building spacecraft. The US has created a series of sophisticated, individualistic, heroic vehicles, often in a quite unsustainable way, and seems to have an emotional attitude to exploration based on the opening up it's western wilderness. The USSR successfully chose an iterative approach which reused as many designs as possible, and when it turned to grandstand vehicles (N1, Energia, Buran) things went sour. Post-Soviet Russia has had a similar history, reusing older designs while failing to make much of new ones (except on paper). The UK's tragic history is one of technical excellence, start-stop funding and grumpy withdrawal from the scene. Japan builds expensive, off-beat spacecraft - and loves to launch subsatellites from their spacecraft. China does what it does, when it does.

I could go on, and I realise that much of the preceding analysis is easy to challenge - but perhaps there's a basis in the way each society is structured. The fault lines if power and money run deep, never mind each nation's mythologies...
« Last Edit: 04/15/2013 08:26 am by Bob Shaw »

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