Author Topic: Lunar Prospector - Ant's Eye View of the Launch Vehicle Acquisition Controversy  (Read 1393 times)

Offline Danderman

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In the year leading up to the 1998 launch of Lunar Prospector, a major issue regarding launch vehicle selection emerged, one that threatened the very existence of the $62 million mission. Although the mission baselined an Athena II launcher, which had already been contracted for, and which was ready for launch, the Athena launch experienced a launch failure in another program, and NASA management demanded that LP transfer to a "safer" vehicle; the most comparable launch vehicle in terms of performance was a small Delta II, but the cost of that Delta II was significantly higher than Athena II, so much so that the $62 million budget cap would be exceeded, which was not permissible under the Discovery program groundrules.

In short, what NASA was doing was performing a de facto cancellation of Lunar Prospector, due to a fear that the Athena would fail. NASA would rather kill the mission than try to fly it on Athena, even though most of the funding for LP had been spent, and the spacecraft was largely ready to fly.

Further adding to the controversy was the issue of who in the Discovery program was responsible for launch vehicle acquisition - NASA HQ or the Principle Investigator (or Program Manager)? Under Discovery groundrules, the mission lead was responsible for the LV, not NASA HQ. However, in this case, NASA HQ was invoking mission assurance to supersede the mission lead.

It happens that I was in the room where the controversy came to a head, and I don't know if Dr. Binder, the mission lead, was ever made aware of how the issue was debated in Washington.  At the moment in time where NASA HQ had determined that Athena II would not be used, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin invited a group to talk to him about space policy in the Capitol building, also inviting some of the members of the House space subcommittee (I don't recall the circumstances of this meeting, who was invited, why it was scheduled, all I know is what happened). Anyway, it was a pleasant and interesting meeting, until the issue of the Discovery program came up. Someone asked an innocent question about the recently started Discovery program, and Jim Benson, founder of SpaceDev, at that moment decided to take Dan Goldin to task about the issue of LV acquisition, and things got quite heated. Apparently, SpaceDev had some ideas about bidding for Discovery with the intention of providing a launch vehicle for the mission, and it was obvious that this strategy would only work if the mission lead could select the launch vehicle. Things got hot, and Dan Goldin decided to escape this uncomfortable situation (the congressmen present were effectively his bosses or customers) by stating that NASA's policy was to let the mission lead acquire the LV).

At that moment, he was shouted down by many in the group who threw the Lunar Prospector LV issue back at him - this resulted in a series of questions to Goldin about the Lunar Prospector acquisition, but by then, Goldin was on record, in front of members of the Space subcommittee, that Lunar Prospector's launch vehicle decision would be made by the mission lead, ie Dr. Binder.  This led to the Delta II "decision" dissolving, Athena II was effectively re-instated, and Lunar Prospector flew to the Moon on an Athena that flew perfectly.

The rest is history.   ;D

Offline Blackstar

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I think that NASA eventually arrived at a not-quite-ideal solution for later Discovery (and eventually, New Frontiers missions). Essentially they declared that the decision over launch vehicle selection was to be made by HQ, but they would not necessarily make a decision early in the design process. My guess is that for most missions this was simply not a problem because Delta II was the baseline vehicle (and Athena eventually went away, so there were no smaller options).

But it did become a problem for New Horizons, where the spacecraft team was told that they needed to baseline BOTH an Atlas and a Delta, and that cost them a lot of money, because they had to figure out how the spacecraft would perform on either vehicle. It was not until very late in the design phase that NASA HQ picked the rocket.

The New Horizons PI used to give briefings where he talked about the sources of various cost overruns and the requirement to include both vehicles was a substantial hit to their program.

Offline Jim

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That happened for any spacecraft that could fly on multiple vehicles.  The choice was to either select a launch vehicle early and pay for longer integration time or pay for dual/multiple integration     

Offline Blackstar

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There's an important factor that changed at some point--relatively recently, but I'm going to be lazy and not look it up.

What used to happen is that the launch vehicle was included in the cost cap for the program. So there was an incentive for the PI to go with a lower cost vehicle to free up money for the spacecraft (of course, they could end up getting bit by this, because the cost of reducing spacecraft weight can often be greater than the cost of the next step up for a launch vehicle).

The problem was that starting around 2005 or so launch vehicle costs started to go through the roof. Somebody could baseline a Delta II at $90 million and a couple of years later discover that it now cost $130 million (I'm somewhat making the figures up, but they're ballpark--the point is that the cost increases were substantially higher than inflation). This was killing the PIs. It's impossible to design a spacecraft to one cost and then suddenly discover that you're going to be $40 million short because the launch vehicle--which you don't control--is getting more expensive.

So NASA took the launch vehicles out of the missions and lowered the cost caps a bit. They are not factored into the PI's cost cap for Discovery or New Frontiers.

The situation is not getting any better, by the way. Atlas is getting more and more expensive and that money is eating into the science budgets.

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