Well, there is a thread on Resource Prospector at the Lunar HSF section. It will far, far less than $1 bn, closer to a few hundred. It has been under development for years, scraping by whatever its PI would find: Money and students from the education projects, use of a brand new control center when it needed a simulated mission for testing and today the US Taiwan cooperation treaty which is what currently pays for most of its work. Still it has yet to enter Phase B because it has never had an approved new start, it does not have a lander, only the rover and it has the bad habit of falling in the cracks between SMD and HEOMD since it does quite fit in either. SMD has a lunar sample return mission in the New Frontiers category and there is one proposal in NF4. There were lunar proposals in the last Doscovery round. However it is not high in the decadal survey for surveys. If HEOMD wants a lunar rover, likely they will have to pay for it. In any case we might just see a rover go to the Moon with GLXP soon. Then again with GXLP, nothing is certain until it reaches the launchpad.
With access to lower cost XPrize landers and rovers they can start with bare minimum sensors and fit them to lowest cost lander or rover mission. Being so close revisit rates between missions can be months apart not years like Mars and other planets.
what kind of lifetime and reliability will they have? None of the GLXP goals includes lifetime and reliability. Low cost is useless if the spacecraft only lasts a short time. You don't want to spend a few hundred million dollars for a few days of operations.
Quote from: Blackstar on 10/13/2017 01:00 pmwhat kind of lifetime and reliability will they have? None of the GLXP goals includes lifetime and reliability. Low cost is useless if the spacecraft only lasts a short time. You don't want to spend a few hundred million dollars for a few days of operations.GLXP is about creating a basic capability to get to the surface of the Moon and maybe scoot or hop around a bit. ..
Priorities at NASA seem to be shifting back towards landing men on the moon.
One of the key selling points for the moon is the prospect of mining ice and producing rocket fuel.
“We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond,” he said. “The moon will be a stepping-stone, a training ground, a venue to strengthen our commercial and international partnerships as we refocus America’s space program toward human space exploration.”
whatever has been shown has mostly been really a set of kludges hard optimized to just solve that particular GLXP challenge, rather than a general purpose system.
NASA has a lunar pallet lander concept which is much closer to a generic, "fly anything as a payload" capability
NASA has now been given 45 days to come up with a "plan," although what exactly that means is unclear. ..There was a lot of stuff that NASA did in the background responding to the VSE that was quite smart and which showed an evolution in their thinking. I'm guessing that most people have forgotten about all that. Hopefully, people at JSC are pulling out their old computer files and stuff like that and looking at what they did. Unfortunately, JSC killed their history program, so it's unlikely that there was any kind of formal effort to save that work.
If you go back to how NASA responded to the Vision for Space Exploration, there were a number of initial steps that they identified. When the VSE was drafted (prior to its announcement) the people in the Bush White House who drafted it asked some knowledgeable people at JSC a simple question: "If you were told to send humans back to the Moon, what is the first thing you want to do? What do you need?"
The answer they got back was "Higher resolution photos of potential landing sites." That led to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and if you look at the original VSE white paper, it points to what became LRO."