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#900
by
olasek
on 04 Dec, 2011 21:40
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Donīt lost track of the exceptionally low cost of this mission.
Like it was said it is all because of extremely low wages in Russia, if an average space engineer is paid monthly in Russia around $500 (reported recently ) which is probably around 10-15 times less than NASA has to pay then you understand what is going on. So if you want compare apples to apples you should rather adopt some other metrics like numbers of engineering hours that went into the project and believe me once you did this this P-G mission would no longer look such low cost.
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#901
by
pechisbeque
on 04 Dec, 2011 21:41
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b. MER was design for a unique orbital alignment that only occurs every 16 years. If the missions were delayed from 2003 to 2005, then Delta II would not have been able to launch them. And yet, if another launch vehicle like Atlas II were to be used, the approach velocity to Mars would be too great for the MER EDL system.
Was the delta-v required for a 2005 mission so much higher than for 2003, that this could not have been accommodated in the mass margins for the MER missions?
Do you know of any literature that shows the delta-v requirements for this 16-year cycle you mentioned?
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#902
by
Jim
on 04 Dec, 2011 21:50
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Was the delta-v required for a 2005 mission so much higher than for 2003, that this could not have been accommodated in the mass margins for the MER missions?
No. There were no margins for launch. There were many performance enhancements already, such as lower park orbit, early fairing jettison, etc. The second launch had to use a Delta II Heavy as it was.
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#903
by
savuporo
on 04 Dec, 2011 22:06
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Hi, my first post: Donīt lost track of the exceptionally low cost of this mission.
I'm not sure that quite accurate. The total cost of the mission is quoted to be 5 billion rubles ( $163M USD ). This really isn't extremely cheap.
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#904
by
Vladi
on 04 Dec, 2011 22:12
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There are a few things that I don't think are visible to most forum members from the US. Actually, labour in Russia is not that cheap and especially Moscow is terribly expensive. A good programmer there could easily get 3-4 times more money per month or more. This causes a huge problem, as all qualified personnel tends to move out of the likes of Lavochkin, which leaves them only with too young and inexperienced people or too old, with the rare idealist in between. This in turn leads to all imaginable and unimaginable problems. Couple that with no experience in interplanetary spacecraft since the Phobos missions (Mars96 does not really count, they did not manage to operate it and get all the experience out of it) and intermittent funding and you get quite a task to solve. Finally, Phobos-Grunt is supposed to be the start of a new basic space platform for future missions, which adds complexity and means that you have a huge amount of new untested technologies there.
Finally, there are a lot of things on the spacecraft that have to be bought or assembled, with the price of components more or less the same across the world.
The challenge for the Russians was huge, let's hope that in the next attempt when they try to reach the Moon things will be better.
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#905
by
Jason1701
on 04 Dec, 2011 22:30
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Hi, my first post: Donīt lost track of the exceptionally low cost of this mission.
I'm not sure that quite accurate. The total cost of the mission is quoted to be 5 billion rubles ( $163M USD ). This really isn't extremely cheap.
I would guess NASA would start talking about a Phobos sample return for ten times the price.
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#906
by
olasek
on 05 Dec, 2011 00:11
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I would guess NASA would start talking about a Phobos sample return for ten times the price.
Maybe, but it is academic since NASA is not interested in sample return from Phobos, they want to do a sample return from Mars which they consider far more interesting from life-sciences perspective. And this would involve an independent rover that would collect samples from different sites and then a separate return mission. It is still a bit far into the future though.
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#907
by
Blackstar
on 05 Dec, 2011 00:12
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I would guess NASA would start talking about a Phobos sample return for ten times the price.
The nearest comparison is the OSIRIS-REx mission, which is under construction for $800 million, plus the launch vehicle (figure another $200 million).
Of course, there are several problems in making straight-up comparisons. For instance, F-G was paid for with old money and O-R is going to use money that has suffered from inflation (launch in 2016).
Another problem is that the missions are not directly comparable, because they have different instrument suites.
That said, what is cheaper--a $163 million mission that fails in Earth orbit, or a $1 billion mission that achieves its objectives?
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#908
by
edkyle99
on 05 Dec, 2011 02:30
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I would guess NASA would start talking about a Phobos sample return for ten times the price.
The nearest comparison is the OSIRIS-REx mission, which is under construction for $800 million, plus the launch vehicle (figure another $200 million).
Of course, there are several problems in making straight-up comparisons. For instance, F-G was paid for with old money and O-R is going to use money that has suffered from inflation (launch in 2016).
Another problem is that the missions are not directly comparable, because they have different instrument suites.
That said, what is cheaper--a $163 million mission that fails in Earth orbit, or a $1 billion mission that achieves its objectives?
One must also consider the cost/probability of a $1 billion mission that fails.
- Ed Kyle
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#909
by
Chris Bergin
on 05 Dec, 2011 02:50
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I'm writing up a short "hope's pretty much lost" article (mainly because our latest one is still on the good news about the ESA comms), so if I can ask to ensure I don't misrepresent...
This is double the mass of UARS - but mainly because of the unused prop. Is this mass still a potential ground hazard after entry, or is it expected hardly anything of the spacecraft's hardware will survive?
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#910
by
olasek
on 05 Dec, 2011 03:00
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One must also consider the cost/probability of a $1 billion mission that fails.
Again, costs are so different because of wage disparity that they are almost meaningless. Cost of failure perhaps should be measured in engineering hours, or percentage of GDP or percentage of average daily Russian wage per person or as percentage of scientific data successfully collected in previous Mars missions or some other suitable metric.
or is it expected hardly anything of the spacecraft's hardware will survive?
Call me an optimist but in my opinion hardly anything will survive, no fuel will reach the planet, there will be no contamination. The fuel is in aluminum tanks and they burn rapidly.
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#911
by
Chris Bergin
on 05 Dec, 2011 03:15
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Thanks Olasek - that's what I was thinking (the entry hazards are usually noted, like the mirror on ROSAT). Hadn't heard of any relevant flags with this spacecraft.
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#912
by
Chris Bergin
on 05 Dec, 2011 04:06
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#913
by
FinalFrontier
on 05 Dec, 2011 04:13
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Dang thats a real bummer
. Too bad. Really is too bad.
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#914
by
rklaehn
on 05 Dec, 2011 10:15
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#915
by
MP
on 05 Dec, 2011 10:38
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#916
by
Archibald
on 05 Dec, 2011 10:55
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I think the confusion come from the earliest launches - the 1960 window. The Soviet lost a load of early probes to reluctant upper stages that never restarted for TMI.
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#917
by
Michael J
on 05 Dec, 2011 11:51
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#918
by
Kaputnik
on 05 Dec, 2011 12:04
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What has changed so that hope has now been given up? The probe went a couple of weeks without 'speaking', how do we know it isn't just going through another similar phase?
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#919
by
John Duncan
on 05 Dec, 2011 12:11
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It's all about being realistic. I'd *love* for this to be a Cinderella story and have PG head on to Mars or some other worthy mission. But it's unlikely now after all this time.
I hope those engineers get another shot at this sort of mission in the future.
. Too bad. Really is too bad.