How Much Has NASA Spent on Resource Prospector?
NASA Statement on Resource Prospector and RESOLVE Costs
“NASA’s early prototype work on the Regolith and Environmental Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatiles Extraction or RESOLVE project, which was an integrated set of general prospecting payloads, provided the basis for the initial instruments for the Resource Prospector (RP) mission concept. The agency invested an estimated $22 million in RESOLVE’s early technology development/prototyping efforts. Since the RP team was formed in 2014 after the completion of a mission concept review, NASA has invested an estimated total of $80 million toward refining the mission concept and mission-specific risk reduction activities. NASA’s overall Resource Prospector work toward risk reduction activities to advance instrument developments, component technologies including rover components, and innovation mission operations concepts will help inform future missions. An agency review to send selected instruments from Resource Prospector to the Moon is ongoing.”
Lunar Community Responds To Resource Prospector Cancellation (Update), earlier post
You asked the exact same question about STS, years ago, when NASA started bragging some silly low-ball answers to how much it cost to launch the shuttle. As I recall they were using unit costs derived from a very high launch rate (remember when STS was to fly every week?) And they had not amortized any development costs, plus they under-estimated the costs to refurb the solids.
I don’t blame them for the spin, actually, except for th troubling fact that NASA is a governmental agency. Still, they want to put thier work in the best light.
And it’s easy to do; there are so many (moving) parts that a crafty person can support a very wide range of costs.
“Too much money” which could have spent far better, for far more value, in the private sector.
It is true that they would be smart, in these expansionist circumstances, to televise this not only on NASA TV but also promote it through the wider press.
Which brings my question, will Keith Cowing and others in this forum be there? If so then that will help the rest of us pass along anything useful.
My read of this and other recent announcements from NASA is that the propulsion and hab modules of the Lunar Orbital Outpost, as defined under the first several SLS/Orion missions, are just the core of a larger (perhaps much larger) International station that will have other modules provided, and launched, by International and commercial partners.
Is that anyone else’s interpretation here as well?
I plan to be there.
A question about how NASA accounts for these things currently: Might some substantial portion of that stated funding be covering salary & overhead for people who’d be on the overall NASA payroll anyway? IE, not real additional funding spendable on real additional resources, but rather a matter of internal accounting?
If so, is there any easy way to tell how much of that $22m +$80m represents real additional resources?
I do know NASA used to not count project personnel toward a project’s official budget, which also made it really hard to track actual resources going into a project. They did change that at some point, I recall.
It would take some digging to find out. You’re asking about full cost accounting, and different parts of NASA handle it differently. Discovery and New Frontiers missions, for example, keep track of both the “PI managed” budget and the “total cost to NASA.” And the rules for what falls in which category have changed from AO to AO. But even if those numbers include things like civil service salaries, those people’s time could have been used for something else. So I would still call it additional resources going to this project.