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Space & Planetary Science

Confusion About Future NASA Landers on Mars

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
February 28, 2012
Filed under , , , ,

Proposed Mars Mission Has New Name
“A proposed Discovery mission concept led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to investigate the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets by studying the deep interior of Mars now has a new name, InSight.”
JPL’s InSight: Ignoring The Real Costs – and its MPL Heritage, earlier post
“The highly successful Mars Phoenix is (logically) mentioned as a way to claim cost savings. But when Phoenix was proposed the cost savings from heavy reuse of failed Mars Polar Lander heritage hardware were cited – but never fully explained. If this mission is approved there is no doubt that JPL and SMD PAO will once again try and claim massive cost savings and simultaneously not mention the money spent to develop the hardware for previous missions.”
Keith’s note: Oddly, NASA SMD leadership present at the MEPAG meeting cast considerable doubt on having a lander heading for Mars until 2018 – at the earliest (if then). Indeed, they were far more certain that whatever might fly to Mars in 2018 would be an orbiter – not a lander.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

21 responses to “Confusion About Future NASA Landers on Mars”

  1. AnonymousFourEyedCoward says:
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    If InSight (formerly GEMS) were to be selected for flight, it would be a Discovery mission, not a Mars Exploration Program mission. This might account for the lack of discussion of InSight at the MEPAG meeting. Furthermore, since InSight is one of three mission concepts in competition for flight, discussing it at MEPAG might be seen as support for the mission by NASA or NASA HQ which would cause the science community to doubt the fairness of the competition.

  2. Aniruddha Guha says:
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    It’s a Discovery mission. Cost capped at $500 mil.

    • kcowing says:
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      I sat in a press briefing yesterday where the SMD AA and staff said that you couldn’t do a lander for less than $700m.

      • Steve Whitfield says:
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        the SMD AA and staff said that you couldn’t do a lander for less than $700m

        Keith,

        Who is the “you” in that sentence? I’m guessing he means that SMD can’t do a lander for less than $700m.

        So NASA can’t do missions that meet the requirements of current goals, only missions that fit within a certain cost window, whether they make sense or not. And it comes down to do the lesser missions or nothing. It’ll take just short of forever to make any progress that way.

        Unless… contract out the entire program, including the program management, for a firm, fixed price, plus a fixed contingency fund, and the contract is based on milestone progress payments and penalty clauses for lateness — just like in the real world. NASA would write the initial requirements spec (appended to an RFP), then refine it with the contract winner (as a separate, precursor program/contract). NASA would also participate in acceptance testing (the details of the ATP are defined in the precursor program). Everything in between is the responsibility of the contractor with NASA participating in only scheduled, pre-defined customer review meetings — to assess milestones, not to participate in design reviews. And one more thing — the contracts do not go to the lowest bidder; but rather the contractor who 1) most effectively addresses the spec requirements in their proposal and 2) has the best/most demonstrated relevant past successes. (Contractors with less experience have their opportunities as subcontractors selected by the prime.) Price would be one factor only, in conjunction with the above, and not the determining factor; the bid price must be within a pre-decided range that the bidders are not told.

        Steve

        • kcowing says:
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          I sat 3 feet from John Grunsfeld and Jim Green when they said this.  I did not see you in the room. Speculate as you will, but I was there, you were not.

          • Steve Whitfield says:
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            Keith,

            I wasn’t speculating about anything, just looking for clarification. Were Grunsfeld and Green saying that NASA couldn’t do a lander for under $700M or that nobody could? Your comment said, “you couldn’t” and I’m not sure who “you” was.

            Also, I think it’s a straight jacket for NASA to have to fit missions into one of the mission types, which each have (what I consider) a mighty low cost cap for a planetary mission.

            The rest of my post was just suggesting one way that I think perhaps NASA planetary programs could be done more cost-effectively than they are now.

            Steve

          • Gwest says:
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            If a solar system probe cannot be done under $500M right now, then the proposal is just a step too far.

            Once again, i think it’s wiser to spend the money doing tech shakeout and demonstrator missions rather than these uber expensive far out science focused probes.

          • mjwolff says:
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            What kind of petulant response is this for a putative journalist?  Of course that is what they said.  When they mean is a lander that actually does a few things.  Insight is a focussed package that doesn’t  require much effort once landed.  They have a camera that was proposed to observed for only 15 sols.  On Mars for a year and the camera operates for 15 sols.  To equate Insight with a general purpose lander would imply a lack the Insight proposal.

        • dannsci says:
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          Steve, your “real world” comment brings to mind something that has come up from time to time, that is,
          Why can’t there be a “commercial planetary space” effort that follows a similar model to “manned commercial” effort?   The CPS runs alongside and as a compliment to the Flagships, etc.  

  3. no one of consequence says:
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    … because MPL / Phoenix lander is too cheap.

  4. tankmodeler says:
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    If you can reuse the lander itself as a “build to print” program with new instruments added to the deck, I think a lot of money could be saved. The lander bus is a major portion of development cost of such a mission and if Lockheed makes another Phoenix lander, that wuold put them miles ahead on costs. Of course, NASA has a bad record of “build to print”. It always seems to be make it just liekt he other one… Except these changes. Which then proceed to wipe out teh cost savings from the older design.

    If scope creep can be kept out of it, it can be done less expensively. But it will take some serious program management stones to make that stick over a 3-4 eyar development program.

    • no one of consequence says:
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       Lockheed can (and does) do this … presuming NASA doesn’t spec it so that they can’t.

      This can be made to work more effectively. As has been done by some of JPL’s rivals.

      Unfortunately, there is not enough “repeat business” for a sole source, nor is a sole source always wise. So what you need is an agreement for a number of prebuilt busess with prepaid integration and a commitment of use, with subcontractor agreements to a wide group of “instrument providers”. Touchy but doable.

    • Paul451 says:
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      It would seem to be a good time for someone at NASA to use the despondency of budget cuts to pull together a group of people from different centres/specialities, to design a multi-planet, multi-probe program to be based around reusable general purpose designs (what you call “build to print”.) Taking a single budget item and turning it into a dozen near-identical missions, instead of having a few big unique missions pick each other apart.

      Ie, position yourself as a “third way”, between the Mars and Europa rivals.

      “But it will take some serious program management stones to make that stick over a 3-4 eyar development program.”

      There’s that, though.

      • DTARS says:
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        Common sense with an eye on value for your buck 🙂 the dollar menu. Take the the pork away and he loses weight and you are left with lean mean fighting machine.

  5. Andrew B says:
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    How does the opinion of NASA SMD representatives have one iota of impact on JPL proposing to a Discovery announcement of opportunity?

    JPL can propose whatever they want, and it will be reviewed through the same process as the rest of the proposals.  At this point it’s a proposal and nothing more.  What JPL does with the bid and proposal money is up to JPL, not SMD.

    I see news is slow lately.  

    • kcowing says:
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      Duh SMD funds these proposals. If the AA and his deputy say that they do not expect to fly a lander until the next decade, one would suppose that would be rather significant. Oh yes, I wonder where all of that money to develop bids comes from ….

      • dannsci says:
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        That’s right, if I recall, each of the 3 programs in competition received $3M, to spent over this year, for continued Mission Development.

      • mjwolff says:
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        Duh even if SMD plans to fly a lander as part of Discovery or the putative 2018 opportunity, they would have to pretend otherwise.   To do otherwise would be to admit to pre-judging the Discover competitive AO or whatever alphabet soup is supposed to provide the “new” Mars architecture later this year. After the ExoMars debacle, to expect NASA to slip-up and announce something that they cannot back-up so soon is sufficiently cynical that it should perhaps be a despair.com poster…

      • cah says:
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        The InSight concept has been knocking around for a while, as has the decision to offer it as a Discovery proposal. As you well know, the opinion of SMD has likely changed in the past couple of months. So although this may not bode well for InSight, they aren’t cause and effect.

  6. sshamba says:
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    It is interesting because “heritage” has become a dirty word at many places in NASA. There was a GAO report on NASA cost overruns a while back that said almost the same thing. Unless the bus is built to print with only the science deck changes, the heritage is nonsense. According GAO using heritage sometimes costs as much as developing new technology from scratch.

  7. DTARS says:
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    Hopeful future maybe???

    Raw looney/mars ideas III
     x prize
    Update per Pauls suggestions

    X prize news flash

    Flock of hopping, roller skating dragons head to the moon for a little drink.

    What stuff would you need for a cheap x prize water mining project on the moon.

    Mission program goal. To demonstrate that water can be mined with a cheap mobile mining, water making, fuel refining factory flock of dragon landers.

    Mobile mining platforms.

    Moving the flock

    Hummmm we want to have all landing platforms be about the size of a Spacex Dragon. 

    If all dragons can fly they can hop too. 
    If they have enough fuel a dragon factory unit can hop to another location to stay up with the flock.

    Plus our dragons need to like to roller skate.

    Wouldn’t it be easy to have all looney dragon landers have wheels above their landing legs after landing impact you retract your legs a little so all dragon landers ARE rovers. No sky crane needed.

    Maybe not for the very first moon sorties but have Spacex develop a moon fuel drinking Draco so that our flock can mine its own fuel to keep it on the move, sharing the fuel they mine.

    How many dragons do you need in your flock? Hummmm
    Let’s name them 
     
    Driller, baker, maker, tanker, seeker, science and survey, and talker

    That’s seven lol and the Ice is Snow White

    All these landers skins are solar collectors or they have collectors that follow the sun. Plus all dragons can plug into each other to share battery and solar power as needed.

    DRILLER has the a ability to mine the water out of the ground.

    BAKER has a nuke generator that cooks the soil to separate the water

    MAKER manufactures the fuel

    TANKER stores and transports fuel, you would need two of these to keep the factory running continuously.

    SEEKER hunts for water with it’s fast rover that it garages for hops

    SCEINCE AND SURVAY are just like Seaker but with different packages.

    TALKER communicates with satellites  or earth and has high gain antenna. 

    All units are mobile and can feed each other fuel as needed and could receive supples from any new dragons sent from earth to join the flock

    Sooo using just 6 to 8 dragon size landers couldn’t you start a demo moon/mars factory?

    How many dragons could a falcon Heavy get to the planet surface in one flight?

    Couldn’t a falcon heavy easily leave a fuel depot in looney/Mars orbit? Or a point?

    This idea was written to suggest possibilities and was not researched so any advice on how to improve or make possible the theme of starting a robot moon/mars mining operation for x prize like prices sure would be appreciated.

    Time to go outside and watch some birds. 

    Couldn’t such a small mobile flock travel around the moon/mars leaving behind it loaded fuel tanks/depots which tanker could shuttle to where ever it is needed.

    X prize mission

    Pre dragon factory mission should be a tesla rover mission. The rover and dragon platform should be solar powered. You have a tesla rover inside your dragon that is lowered out the bottom after landing with standard science package on board(to follow the water lol). In addition you have wheels on your dragon platform and demonstrate platform roller skating.
    Also once your standard rover has traveled off exploring you hop you dragon platform to another location to meet back up with you standard rover.

    To demonstrate future mobile factory capabilities.

    Also this gives tesla a chance to make a multi purpose rover that can be used again and again on other rocks to do science cheaper in the future.

    Also having two rovers/hopper together on the moon/mars with cameras watching such a mission could be great fun for the public.

    Joe Q

    Seems to me that mining water for fuel on both the moon and Mars is very similar and the missions could be designed and executed together or one being used to shake out rthe system for the other. Since the moon is closer, no time delay and easer to land on, and lift from,it is cheaper so I would suggest testing the hardware there first.

    Sharing similar platforms and rovers sure could greatly reduce cost.

    So stop fussing about who has more pie and find away to work together to do it all cheaper.

    It does take rocket scientist!

    So y’ll be smart

    The dreams is still alive but it’s get hard to recall it. Y’ll better hurry!!!