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> So every mission is bespoke, and has to be done again completely from scratch. Is there room here for making things more reusable? For example, instead of cr

by dom96 2y ago

> So every mission is bespoke, and has to be done again completely from scratch. Is there room here for making things more reusable? For example, instead of creating one big satellite with tens of instruments, how about they create 10 satellites with one instrument each? or would that still be too bespoke to lower the cost per item?

philistine 2y ago
While we now live in an era of abundant rocket launches, it used to cost far more to launch with very few launches per year. The whole strategies of exploration haven’t shifted yet to this new paradigm. Hopefully NASA starts making smaller probes and launching them far more often.
- mandevil 2y ago
  Europa Clipper is literally the largest thing ever launched to the outer planets (so big that Falcon Heavy can't be reused for this mission, they have to throw it all away in order to get every last jot of performance out of the rocket- so this is not an "abundant rocket launches" situation- this is a fully expendable rocket just like an Atlas V). And the size is not for fun, but because going close to Europa (the entire point of the mission) means going through the second strongest set of EM and radiation belts in our solar system. Even with this size- meaning it can have a lot more shielding than normal- the probe can only survive a few months of the radiation from Jupiter's van Allen belts. The plan is to break that few months of exposure up over about four years of calendar time, by having it do highly elliptical orbits so it stores a lot of data during a close flyby of Europa and then transmits that all back to Earth while it is far outside of Jupiter's radiation storm, then it can head back down and collect more data. And that lengthy transmission time is because it is sending information from so far away- and has so little juice that the effective bandwidth is tiny. It is possible for a swarm of small satellites to fill niches in space exploration. Closely studying Europa isn't really one of them with today's technology.
  - solarwindy 2y ago
    Not quite fully expendable. Commentary during the livestream was that they’ll recover the fairing, for what it’s worth.
  - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
    But if launches are cheap, why not build it while in our orbit and then send it? To me that is one of the things “cheap launches” provide… send up five smaller rockets into our orbit and assemble the beast up there. Easier said than done, of course.
    - mandevil 2y ago
      Right now, I think only three things have been assembled from multiple launches like you are proposing: Mir, ISS, and Tiangong. All of which were super expensive and the result of years of careful design work. Definitely not the way to make something cheap! There was some talk about using ISS as a base for on-orbit assembly but the orbit (half-way between best orbit from KSC and Baikonur) isn't great for that and it turns out that constant docking and un-docking ruins scientific experiments requiring microgravity, so ISS really isn't a great base for assembly. Ideally, if you want to start on orbit assembly you'd have another station in the right orbit for KSC which isn't doing any microgravity research, but now we're talking about massive up front investment to save money on research satellites, is NASA ever going to get the scale of research budget for that savings to be worth it? If something like Space Based Solar Power ever become a thing then such an on orbit assembly station would make sense, but the case for assembly for science missions really only closes if you have the station already for something else.
      - Asraelite 2y ago
        > only three things have been assembled from multiple launches like you are proposing: Mir, ISS, and Tiangong I would also count the Apollo missions. They launched on a single rocket, but the docking between the CSM and Lunar Module was for all intents and purposes equally difficult to assembly on orbit. There are multiple commercial companies planning to assemble stations over the next few years. This in addition to the on-orbit refueling that SpaceX will be doing should hopefully enable a new generation of larger, assembled interplanetary probes.

by dom96 2y ago

philistine 2y ago

While we now live in an era of abundant rocket launches, it used to cost far more to launch with very few launches per year. The whole strategies of exploration haven’t shifted yet to this new paradigm. Hopefully NASA starts making smaller probes and launching them far more often.

mandevil 2y ago
Europa Clipper is literally the largest thing ever launched to the outer planets (so big that Falcon Heavy can't be reused for this mission, they have to throw it all away in order to get every last jot of performance out of the rocket- so this is not an "abundant rocket launches" situation- this is a fully expendable rocket just like an Atlas V). And the size is not for fun, but because going close to Europa (the entire point of the mission) means going through the second strongest set of EM and radiation belts in our solar system. Even with this size- meaning it can have a lot more shielding than normal- the probe can only survive a few months of the radiation from Jupiter's van Allen belts. The plan is to break that few months of exposure up over about four years of calendar time, by having it do highly elliptical orbits so it stores a lot of data during a close flyby of Europa and then transmits that all back to Earth while it is far outside of Jupiter's radiation storm, then it can head back down and collect more data. And that lengthy transmission time is because it is sending information from so far away- and has so little juice that the effective bandwidth is tiny. It is possible for a swarm of small satellites to fill niches in space exploration. Closely studying Europa isn't really one of them with today's technology.
- solarwindy 2y ago
  Not quite fully expendable. Commentary during the livestream was that they’ll recover the fairing, for what it’s worth.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  But if launches are cheap, why not build it while in our orbit and then send it? To me that is one of the things “cheap launches” provide… send up five smaller rockets into our orbit and assemble the beast up there. Easier said than done, of course.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    Right now, I think only three things have been assembled from multiple launches like you are proposing: Mir, ISS, and Tiangong. All of which were super expensive and the result of years of careful design work. Definitely not the way to make something cheap! There was some talk about using ISS as a base for on-orbit assembly but the orbit (half-way between best orbit from KSC and Baikonur) isn't great for that and it turns out that constant docking and un-docking ruins scientific experiments requiring microgravity, so ISS really isn't a great base for assembly. Ideally, if you want to start on orbit assembly you'd have another station in the right orbit for KSC which isn't doing any microgravity research, but now we're talking about massive up front investment to save money on research satellites, is NASA ever going to get the scale of research budget for that savings to be worth it? If something like Space Based Solar Power ever become a thing then such an on orbit assembly station would make sense, but the case for assembly for science missions really only closes if you have the station already for something else.
    - Asraelite 2y ago
      > only three things have been assembled from multiple launches like you are proposing: Mir, ISS, and Tiangong I would also count the Apollo missions. They launched on a single rocket, but the docking between the CSM and Lunar Module was for all intents and purposes equally difficult to assembly on orbit. There are multiple commercial companies planning to assemble stations over the next few years. This in addition to the on-orbit refueling that SpaceX will be doing should hopefully enable a new generation of larger, assembled interplanetary probes.