Free NRO Telescopes Will Cost NASA More

1. Mount them on the ISS, where they can continue to be upgraded at minimal cost.

   1. the space around the ISS is full of gases, liquids and other debris jettisoned from the station that would gum up the optics.

      also, attaching it to the ISS would make it almost unusable. space telescopes capture such highly detailed images because they are free from any disturbances, atmospheric or otherwise. they are designed to stay very, very still. the vibrations of gear on the ISS would make such observations impossible.

      also, because the ISS always has one side facing the Earth, and it has an orbit close to the Earth, and it is moving quite fast, it would be difficult to keep the telescope aligned with a particular area of the sky.

      1. This view is understandable because it was commonly held long before the first space station was launched, but it is not entirely accurate. The external ISS environment has been measured and is cleaner than any previous station by orders of magnitude. http://science.nasa.gov/med… Damping vibrations in a mounting plate is trivial compared to providing three-axis stabilization inluding momentum wheels, communications with earth, and power for a free flyer. Maintaining pointing accuracy from ISS is straightforward, and Hubble is only slightly higher and copes quite effectively with the presence of the earth. The fact that the station is “moving rapidly” is irrelevant when the target is light-years away, but even earth observation from LEO, where relative movement of the target is high, is well understood. Day-night thermal fluctuations can be avoided by sunshades. The most important advantages of ISS mounting are cost, power (permitting active sensor cooling) and accessibility for upgrades.

         1. it indeed says it is cleaner than previous space stations, but i see it mentions that there are levels of contamination that will happen, and it notes the amounts.

            so there’s LESS contamination. but there’d still be contamination. if you want to fuzz up a billion dollar telescope by putting it on the ISS, be my guest.

            i’ll give you the vibrations thing, though i have been under the impression that even using the vibration isolated treadmill causes the ISS to vibrate anyway.

            but the limitations imposed on a telescope by being bolted to the ISS are pretty severe. you can’t look everywhere you might want to if the modules or the solar panels of ISS is in the way, you’re effectively limited to looking straight up. and the orbital motion in that case is a problem, because the field of view moves.

            1. a bigger challenge might be the inherent instability of the ISS orbit. Unlike a purpose specific spacecraft with a nice stable orbit, ISS moves up and down, changes attitude, etc. It’s also pretty huge (football stadium sized) so it flexes a lot: meters of relative movement over the length of the ISS. All of this is fairly straightforward to deal with, but it IS an extra complexity with a high resolution imaging application.

               If I were flying a telescope, I think I’d rather have a dedicated spacecraft. The big cost is getting up to orbit anyway.

            2. Cost is the whole point. A free flyer needs a dedicated launch, and dedicated systems for stabilization, comm, and power. When a free flyer has a failure or runs out of a consumable,it is often the end of the mission.

               The ISS has dedicated logistical flights, and a medium-aperture scope (<127cm) could fit in the Cygnus or Dragon, a larger one in the Dragon trunk. Replacement sensors and components could be added at any time without a dedicated mission. Power is available for active cooling. A data bus and ground link are also accessible. A second component, the “space tug” was originally part of the Station concept back in the seventies, then called the Space Operations Center or SOC. If a telescope had been checked out but needed to be in a higher orbit for optimum use, it would be attached to the tug instead of the station mounting plate. The tug would move it to a higher orbit (i.e. with a solar-electric thruster) and provide power, stabilization and comm while there. When the scope needed servicing the tug would bring it back to the Station. The SOC design included pressurized and unpressurized “hangar” modules for servicing spacecraft.

         2. It’s well-understood, but expensive. It’s no great secret what the “national assets” were intended for, just google the company that made the mirrors and their other agile satellite projects. Speaking as someone who did a study on adapting these specific telescopes for astronomy, it’s hard to come up with anything with under a $1B price tag, and it’s easy to go much higher. Add the tight pointing stability requirements and the CMGs to actually move anything this massive quickly and it gets very pricey. Oh, and they are designed for basically room temperature – try to go significantly into the IR and you’ll need to rework them. I also second the issues with the dirty environment and the pointing constraints, and will add thermal load from the earth, and other themral and power issues associated with going in and out of earth shadow. Very little in terms of astronomy is likely to go into earth orbit again.

            1. We are still doing astonomy from the ground, and arguing about keeping Sophia flying. Each strategy has cost and value. If we had the budget, a free flyer in deep space would be ideal, but it’s hard to see funding for anything except Webb, and Hubble for as long as it can operate. An attached scope could be implemented on a modest budget and later attached to a tug/comm/stabilization stage and moved to high orbit if desired.

            2. of course there is a third mirror………

      2. [Deleted: redundant]

   2. Just put them in the same orbital plane as the ISS. Maybe then the station crew could use whatever capsule is available for servicing missions.

2. This was pretty much expected from the start. “Free” telescopes that now torque requirements around their pre-existing design inevitably drive up costs. Also, these aren’t built-out spacecraft ready for some instruments, you basically get one telescope assembly and some support frames that may or may not be useful. The second telescope was even more stripped down.

   1. We found with SLS that legacy technology has hidden costs.

      1. Unfortunately that is a lesson that should not have been relearned on SLS as critical and costly as that project is. There is an array of resources not well organized spread across NASA centers on lessons learned, engineering and management best practices and mishap reports. It takes NASA two or three times longer than it should, w/o competitive pressures, to organize such a resource databases. While managing many missions will remain a part of NASA, there is now the opportunity to hand over the most costly development work to private industry – launch vehicles and the capsules for launch and re-entry.

         1. While managing many missions will remain a part of NASA, there is now
            the opportunity to hand over the most costly development work to private
            industry – launch vehicles and the capsules for launch and re-entry.

            I have long advocated that NASA should be reduced to just managing R&D, engineering, and production work performed by contractors (much like the DoD does), as studies and recent programs have shown that cost and schedule suffer tremendously when NASA tries to do it themselves. Unfortunately, this new paradigm is not a lot of fun for NASA engineers and managers, and would make most of them irrelevant, so we just plod along with a seriously dysfunctional organization that relies on political connections to justify its reason for existence rather than actually producing good products on time and at promised cost.

            1. I’m always a bit baffled by these statements. Maybe things are different on the manned side, but in astrophysics NASA actually does very little more than you suggest. Spacecraft, telescopes, instruments, all built by contractors, either the usual players (Lockmart, Ball, etc) or university consortia. NASA does R&D and project management. Even I’m technically a contractor.

            2. On the science side NASA also selects missions by actual discussion with investigators. On the manned spaceflight side missions are chosen by members of Congress. On the aeronautics side I have no idea what happens.

            3. Not completely. Engineers at JPL and APL (I believe) still build flight hardware. Not for all their programs mind you, but some. Gonzo is correct in that the engineering communities at these places do not want to give up that aspect of their responsibilities.

   2. These challenges and mark up of the price to utilize AFTA, shows us what is really hard for NASA – project management. Space exploration has its challenges. Yeah, space is hard. It still holds true – “…not because it is easy…”. However, NASA has always been like a challenged individual when management is involved, which involves everything. The approach to estimating costs for AFTA use is symptomatic of management problems overall.

3. Son of a b#@ch…if NASA can’t figure out how to make these work, then just donate them to SpaceX, for Heaven’s sake. I am sure Elon will be able to figure out a business plan, in which he can economically modify the telescopes, launch them, and turn a profit by selling the observation time to various universities, govt. funded astrophysical projects, rich eccentric amateur astronomers, etc.

   Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the man took it on as a non (or minimum) profit enterprise…with revenues supporting the start-up and operating costs.

   File this under — “A plan so crazy, it just might work.”

   1. Elon is getting enough free stuff already.

   2. it’s not that they can’t “make them work” but that working with the existing structures on them is proving to be more of a challenge – and somewhat more expensive – than first anticipated.

      besides which, if SpaceX had the 2 billion in discretionary funding available to donate to a charity space telescope, you’d think they’d rather spend it on getting their reusable booster and Falcon Heavy to fly.

      1. I’d look at these as more of an example of the curse of requirements creep.

         NASA had a certain telescope size in mind while first designing this program of theirs, when these bigger ones were dropped on their doorstep. They could have just stuck with the experiments they were already working with – and so would only need to worry about structurally and electrically (& optically) adapting to the bigger scopes.

         But instead, NASA scientists (like all scientists, actually) began drooling over wanting to get the most capability possible, in using these bigger mirrors; and also having more internal room in those scopes to put in new, additional “$cience $tuff.”

         THAT is what makes the Req-Creep so insidiou$. Eventually NASA will keep designing in more “newer ($) & better ($$)” equipment than these free scopes could handle, and so as a result they will end up having to “upgrade” ($$$) the scopes’ themselves.

         1. Well, actually many of us felt like we were handed a boat anchor when we were given these things. It was obvious from the beginning that all odds were they would be scrapped, and that this was a move to unload the storage costs onto NASA. There is definitely political pressure (even if unspoken) to use these things. There’s a feeling that if they aren’t used, congress will just turn around and say “you refused the billion dollar gift we gave you, so why should we give you anything?”.

            1. Maybe someone could propose a low-cost application – Could they be used for ground-based astronomy? Possibly the figure is wrong for that, but it might be possible. What about near UV in orbit? That should not require cooling.

         2. That’s a good point, although this new requirement was an unexpected one and presents some additional opportunities, those opportunities come at additional cost, as well…

   3. Your idea closely resembles mine to be found here,

      http://yellowdragonblog.com…

      it calls for using the NRO third mirror with the Dragon capsule and selling Data and / or charging for some instruments as “hosted payloads”
      But its an idea so crazy it might just work!

      1. Hi Steven, I just read your link / blog post. Obviously, you put some serious thought into the concept. Good Stuff. Cheers.

4. In the real world, it doesn’t matter what the going in cost or schedule is. When things go bad, as they inevitably will, Goddard management will just go to Senator Mikulski and whine that “Space is hard!”, whereupon she will kill and gut other nascent NASA programs to pay for their incompetence and keep the Maryland votes flowing in her direction.

5. It’s a federal government project. Even the cost-saving measures end up raising costs.

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