“I’ll buy 10 of those”—NASA science chief yearns for mass-produced satellites

"How in the hell do I get more science into space? That is my goal."

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[flattop100]

There's no building with [... ] spacecraft buses.

Unless you're the NRO. (See "Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope")

 

[Yui]

A probe to the outer planets needs a vastly different spacecraft bus than a climate-monitoring satellite in LEO, which is different again to a Mercury orbiter (for example). Different power sources, different mass contraints, different thermal environment. So the idea of off-the-shelf parts that are universally applicable is a nice idea, but impractical for space science.

 

[Juggernaut_408]

To think that Trump is trying to give / reward 10 billion of our dollars to pay and reward the insurrectionist scumbags that he says our country has wronged. 10 billion of Our tax dollars to idiot treasonous Trumpers. Thats even more than NASA’s whole budget.

 

[ArcaneTourist]

A probe to the outer planets needs a vastly different spacecraft bus than a climate-monitoring satellite in LEO, which is different again to a Mercury orbiter (for example). Different power sources, different mass contraints, different thermal environment. So the idea of off-the-shelf parts that are universally applicable is a nice idea, but impractical for space science.

Every mission getting a bespoke bus is the wrong answer.
Every mission using the same generic bus is also the wrong answer.
The right answer is something between those extremes.

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there should be a couple of standard or semi-standard busses - LEO vs deep space or whatever. Maybe there should be common components and methodologies that can be combined together to build a semi-custom bus.

I don't know what the answer is, but the answer can take any shape as long as it meets the goals. And, the goals should be that getting a satellite bus or backbone takes a "reasonable" amount of effort and money.

 

[frau koujiro]

“How in the hell do I get more science into space? That is my goal,” Fox said.

More funding of NASA instead of the MIC and useless wars might help

(note that this is the type of comment that i want the science division to be doing, and i don't fault Dr. Fox for the bullshit that is this "government")

 

[l8gravely]

They also need to invest more in communications for DSN so they can increase the available bandwidth by 100-1000x current standards. Maybe it's lasers in L2 with Webb and other missions for deep space connections, and then they can do laser down to ground stations when there's a good view available. If it's cloudy, you just goto another ground station.

But just using the radio dishes on earth is getting harder and harder. Either they need more big dishes for all the communications needs, or they need some other solution. I still like the idea of laser to an orbital hub (or two) which can be based on a common NEO bus and have mutliple lasers and receivers for multiple connections at once.

Heck, could they just take some starlink laser links and use them? Probably not optimized for long distance laser comms. And you still need radios for management and backup. But for primary data transmission, let's go laser.

 

[Resistance]

A probe to the outer planets needs a vastly different spacecraft bus than a climate-monitoring satellite in LEO, which is different again to a Mercury orbiter (for example). Different power sources, different mass contraints, different thermal environment. So the idea of off-the-shelf parts that are universally applicable is a nice idea, but impractical for space science.

If we want to accomplish lots more in space, then designing, building, and operating spacecraft needs to be easier. Right now, with bespoke designs, if we wanted to double the amount of missions, we would need to double pretty much everything, including the amount of specialized labourers, something that will always be in limited supply.

Sure that's possible, but I want to multiply the number of missions by at least one order of magnitude, ideally several. If you want to do that too, then you're going to have to support things like standardized radiators, solar panels, radios, antennas, nuclear power generators, and a handful of base spacecraft designs to bolt all these things to. Have a team for each, constantly iterating while maintaining compatibility where possible.

If it were me, I would standardize these things one at a time, perhaps starting with something "simple" and universally required, like radiators.

Will this be wildly inefficient from some perspectives? Yes, especially with regar to the demands on launch capabilities, but we are approaching a state where launch capabilities are much less of a constraint, and the future I want will be functionally impossible without that constraint being minimized anyway.

 

[chekk]

Every mission getting a bespoke bus is the wrong answer.
Every mission using the same generic bus is also the wrong answer.
The right answer is something between those extremes.

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there should be a couple of standard or semi-standard busses - LEO vs deep space or whatever. Maybe there should be common components and methodologies that can be combined together to build a semi-custom bus.

I don't know what the answer is, but the answer can take any shape as long as it meets the goals. And, the goals should be that getting a satellite bus or backbone takes a "reasonable" amount of effort and money.

NASA tried "Faster, Better, Cheaper" and it was a mixed bag.
The Mars Telecom Orbiter seems like something that might benefit from a standard bus.

Something like the Webb Telescope, not so much. I recall an interview with one of its main engineers who noted that sometimes, if you're not on the bleeding edge, you're not pushing the envelope far enough. Part of the reason that thing was so expensive is that when the project was approved and started, they didn't know how to build some of the stuff it required. That wasn't an oversight, that's being on the bleeding edge. It's expensive, but also worth it, at least in this case.

So those quotes around "reasonable" are definitely appropriate. The difference between reasonable in one context and another can be an order of magnitude or more.

 

[DarthSlack]

It's amazing how well NASA is doing these days. Finally putting the right person in charge is paying spades. Big win for the Trump administration.

If by "paying spades" you mean carving up Goddard and JPL for spare parts, I guess so.

 

[dragonzord]

I think this is Nasa finally taking advantage of the wide availability of launch. If you're only rocket is $400M and you only get one shot for a multi year mission, you gotta build the spacecraft to also work in one go for $1B+. But taking the CLPS approach of multiple, small, and cheap launches will bear fruit in the long run by spreading the experience and R&D across a wider industry.

 

[Resistance]

I honestly don't see something as complex as a rocket being entirely an assembly line effort. The amount of resources going into ONE could build dozens of cars. Cars also don't need to be air-tight or carry liquid gases as fuels. The level of effort for one rocket, even something like a Falcon 9, is enormous.

Spoiler: Some insights into this

Moreover launch facilities will always have constraints on them. Just like airports, once you throw something into the air, people notice and it's typically pretty loud. So they need to be far enough away to not create hazards and pollution - noise and chemical, depending on the fuels. It can be done, of course, but the more isolated it is, the more the costs go up for everyone there.

You also need to keep iteration and improvement in mind. An assembly line approach doesn't have a lot of that, since the assembly method doesn't lend a lot of support to iteration without shutting down production. With iteration and improvement, you can literally do that during the assembly of the next rocket if something needs to be tweaked before launching the next rocket. That produces more reliable rockets, but doesn't produce them quickly.

The next question would answer the begging the question statement in your first sentence. WHAT will we accomplish in space?

Show me a commercially viable, profitable product manufactured in space. Lots of things came from the Apollo program - teflon, Tang (they never used it, but they did have a powdered orange drink thing), swipe cards, Mylar and other reflective materials, integrated circuits (arguably something that would have happened anyway), e-mail (the same thing - would have eventually happened), memory foam and a bunch of other things needed for it.

But all of them would have likely happened sooner or later. They didn't NEED the space program to be created. They just filled an eventual need sooner. And none of them came "from space". Since then, there's been some discoveries in materials science from weightless environment experiments, but again, those are not commercially viable products. They're one-off discoveries that may, or may not, find a way to be made in a gravity well.

The shipping and handling fees from SPACE ALONE would be prohibitive. Sciencing isn't going to break a lot of new ground, though there are probably some discoveries that can still be made there. The question is, to what end? "You can't know until you try" doesn't pay the bills. It actually interferes with paying the bills almost all the time because a good number of experiments intended to take advantage of a weightless environment don't translate to an environment with gravity.

The future you want APPEARS to be running in Star Trek World to me. The practical aspects of it are missing - funding, costs, returns, benefits, goals, hell, even human nature. Mankind did NOT evolve in space. We evolved in a gravity field, and space, itself, will kill a human just from the weightlessness alone, given enough time.

And least you think I'm just some old fuck nay-sayer, I grew up in the Space Age. It was magical, seeing all this new stuff doing new things every time something flew. But over the many decades since the 1960's, the nature of space has been better understood, and explored, and poked and prodded. I'm sure there are DISCOVERIES to be made of enormous scientific benefit. But if you're looking at funding a global economy based on space shit, keep looking. That can't happen. It's not fiscally viable as things stand now.

And the way things are going, it won't be, ever.

At least not for mankind. Mabe in a few million years the cockroaches will have better luck.

"The way things are going" sure if you look at today, yeah it's easy to be pessimistic, but once you start looking beyond the last decade you realize that things are actually going really well.

The percentage of the population whose lives are required to be dedicated to food production has dropped dramatically.

Infant mortality has been dropping worldwide,

Life expectancy has been going up.

Literacy and education have exploded.

We are on a trajectory that indicates that the near complete replacement of fossil fuel consumption by renewables is likely inevitable.

Political freedom has, on average, has improved, even in the US, "literacy tests" and poll taxes are mostly a thing of the past. I'm not going to pretend that things are perfect, that there haven't been setbacks, but the trend is clear.

The percentage of the global population living under autocracy has been on a downward trend.

It's been the better part of a century since we have seen conflict on the scale of WWII. Considering how prevalent conflict was before then we have been living in comparatively calm times for a period of unprecedented duration.

Access to clean drinking water has never been so widespread.

Famines are now exclusively the result of human action and inaction instead of that and natural disasters.

Yes there are exceptions to all of these trends, some covering huge portions of the global population and or very long periods of time, but, those are, unambiguously, exceptions to the trends.

 

[IntrepidTachyon]

The Apollo program, the Voyager/Pioneer probes, New Horizons, Cassini, the various Mars rovers, the Space Shuttle, Hubble, James Webb Telescope, Parker Solar Probe, various weather and climate satellites - the list goes on. Americans love to point to NASA's achievements and ingenuity and hold it up as a poster child of exceptionalism and yet the agency is raided faster than a cartoon piggy bank for spare change whenever the government needs to tighten its belt. It's also saddled with building expensive SLS rockets that no longer make financial sense (if they ever did) except to certain congressional members.

Meanwhile the defense department gets insane budget increases with hardly a second look and big contractors like Boeing, Bechtel, and Ratheyon (to name a few) waste billions and never deliver. NASA has repeatedly delivered humanity changing tangibles on relatively modest budgets in comparison to the other things we throw money at as a country.

I'm frustrated that NASA is always being told to "do more with less", especially right now where it's a lot less, but in general given what its delivered and what it "could" do given modest increases in funding. I'll trade a new missle defense sheild that we already spent money on in the 80s (see Star Wars) that didn't work and wasn't feasible for a few missions to Uranus, Venus, or Titan, a servicing or replacement for Hubble, continued funding for weather and climate sats, or upgrades to the DSN. Those at least have tangible potential payoffs.

 

[chekk]

The Apollo program, the Voyager/Pioneer probes, New Horizons, Cassini, the various Mars rovers, the Space Shuttle, Hubble, James Webb Telescope, Parker Solar Probe, various weather and climate satellites - the list goes on. Americans love to point to NASA's achievements and ingenuity and hold it up as a poster child of exceptionalism and yet the agency is raided faster than a cartoon piggy bank for spare change whenever the government needs to tighten its belt. It's also saddled with building expensive SLS rockets that no longer make financial sense (if they ever did) except to certain congressional members.

Meanwhile the defense department gets insane budget increases with hardly a second look and big contractors like Boeing, Bechtel, and Ratheyon (to name a few) waste billions and never deliver. NASA has repeatedly delivered humanity changing tangibles on relatively modest budgets in comparison to the other things we throw money at as a country.

I'm frustrated that NASA is always being told to "do more with less", especially right now where it's a lot less, but in general given what its delivered and what it "could" do given modest increases in funding. I'll trade a new missle defense sheild that we already spent money on in the 80s (see Star Wars) that didn't work and wasn't feasible for a few missions to Uranus, Venus, or Titan, a servicing or replacement for Hubble, continued funding for weather and climate sats, or upgrades to the DSN. Those at least have tangible potential payoffs.

Yup, I'm there with ya. The "JPL and the Space Age" series on Youtube is fantastic at describing those successes.
When the movie Titanic came out, my sister remarked that the Mars Pathfinder mission cost about the same. Food for thought.
Now the US military wants a $1.5T budget. Okay, defense is necessary, but that's a LOT of science and health and other good stuff.

 

[GFKBill]

I honestly don't see something as complex as a rocket being entirely an assembly line effort.

SpaceX would like a word.

 

[GFKBill]

The next step up is the Discovery program, with development budgets of about a half-billion dollars under today’s economic conditions.

I feel like some words got left out there.

 

[A_Very_Tired_Geek]

This isn’t terribly surprising given NASA’s wildly successful Artemis II mission carrying four astronauts around the Moon publicity stunt last month.

Fixed it for you. We already knew this could be done. That flight was pure, expensive politics with very little benefit. The next presidential administration is almost certain to cancel any meaningful move towards colonization. If corporations want to ruin the moon like they have the Earth, let them fund it and take 100% of the risk.

Science has been trying to find a workable solution to custom-made platform experiments for decades, with mixed success. In the wake of the death of the SSC in the early 90s everyone scrambled all over themselves to reduce costs by repurposing off-the-shelf components (one of the reasons why PCs became 'good enough' in lab contexts). With loosening of budget constraints over time, PIs got more careless with hardware budgets. We've never completely gone back to completely bespoke systems, because it's a lot easier to just adapt previously written and tested hardware specifications and components based on those specs, but that lack of budgetary discipline from the 90s still manifests in other ways such as expensive bespoke packages and continuous budget overruns from politics and grift. Cheaper than completely ground up novel designs, but for somethings you really can't get 'off-the-shelf'. Either it doesn't exist and must be designed, fabricated, and debugged, or it's too niche to keep components in stock. You can't just go out and buy a prepackaged ultraviolet band telescope like you can a Celestron NexStar. Nor could order 3 meter visual band mirror from Amazon. But you can buy off-the-shelf cubesats to expand your communications options for said ultraviolet space telescope, or the sensor array for the 3 meter telescope's focal point.

 

[SeeUnknown]

We need a lunar lava tube explorer mission.

We also need a mini habitat to the lunar South Pole that could keep earth worms and plants alive for six months. To do that, we have to work on solutions for the lunar day and night and consistent power supply.

 

[Jack56]

“For $100 million, you can’t buy a bus from somewhere and put four instruments on it and send it to flight to Enceladus to look under the ice there,” Fox said.

But you could if you manufactured a bus for outer system exploration. It wouldn't be any cheaper for the first one but if you do it once it's a lot cheaper per unit to make more of the same and customise them for specific missions. Neptune & Uranus orbiters are a good case in point.

It always amazes me that NASA will spend billions for the bespoke likes of Cassini or Juno or New Horizons and not spend the relatively little extra to make TWO of each. They used to do that. Pioneers 10 & 11 to the outer system. Voyagers 1 & 2 likewise. Two Viking Mars landers. Lots of Mariners.

 

[Argent Claim]

It always amazes me that NASA will spend billions for the bespoke likes of Cassini or Juno or New Horizons and not spend the relatively little extra to make TWO of each. They used to do that. Pioneers 10 & 11 to the outer system. Voyagers 1 & 2 likewise. Two Viking Mars landers. Lots of Mariners.

Frankly, it should not amaze you at all. The spacecraft in your list of 'families' were nowhere near as sophisticated as anything built today, and they still cost a lot more than people realize once inflation is taken into account.

The Voyager probes, for instance, cost $1.2 billion in adjusted dollars. and Pioneers 10 and 11 were close to that. The Viking program cost $6 billion in adjusted dollars. Keep in mind the limited scientific payloads in those listed in older programs relative to modern successors and their far more simple mission demands beyond the Viking program.

Most of the reason for missions being built in pairs decades ago was to provide insurance against launch failures that were quite a bit more common at the time. This was also true with the Soviet Union, and they struggled with payload reliability on top of that despite (or perhaps, because of) using shared busses for most of their interplanetary missions.

 

[Observer]

Every mission getting a bespoke bus is the wrong answer.
Every mission using the same generic bus is also the wrong answer.
The right answer is something between those extremes.

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there should be a couple of standard or semi-standard busses - LEO vs deep space or whatever. Maybe there should be common components and methodologies that can be combined together to build a semi-custom bus.

I don't know what the answer is, but the answer can take any shape as long as it meets the goals. And, the goals should be that getting a satellite bus or backbone takes a "reasonable" amount of effort and money.

Yeah. For convenience we should name those busses with letter acronyms such as A, B, U, X or Y.

Sorry, I'll let myself out...

 

[compgeek89]

How come we don't include venus in our plans. Cheaper to get to. Plenty of solar power.

Would love see a mission to deploy a dirigible to Venus to do some long term monitoring and analysis of the mid atmosphere and map the surface from there. Maybe drop a couple more probes to the surface if we find anything looking interesting....even a few minutes of data before melting would be a huge increase in what we know now.

Seems like a great candidate for more bang for the buck.

 

[Chopfuna]

I honestly don't see something as complex as a rocket being entirely an assembly line effort. The amount of resources going into ONE could build dozens of cars. Cars also don't need to be air-tight or carry liquid gases as fuels. The level of effort for one rocket, even something like a Falcon 9, is enormous.

Spoiler: Some insights into this

Moreover launch facilities will always have constraints on them. Just like airports, once you throw something into the air, people notice and it's typically pretty loud. So they need to be far enough away to not create hazards and pollution - noise and chemical, depending on the fuels. It can be done, of course, but the more isolated it is, the more the costs go up for everyone there.

You also need to keep iteration and improvement in mind. An assembly line approach doesn't have a lot of that, since the assembly method doesn't lend a lot of support to iteration without shutting down production. With iteration and improvement, you can literally do that during the assembly of the next rocket if something needs to be tweaked before launching the next rocket. That produces more reliable rockets, but doesn't produce them quickly.

The next question would answer the begging the question statement in your first sentence. WHAT will we accomplish in space?

Show me a commercially viable, profitable product manufactured in space. Lots of things came from the Apollo program - teflon, Tang (they never used it, but they did have a powdered orange drink thing), swipe cards, Mylar and other reflective materials, integrated circuits (arguably something that would have happened anyway), e-mail (the same thing - would have eventually happened), memory foam and a bunch of other things needed for it.

But all of them would have likely happened sooner or later. They didn't NEED the space program to be created. They just filled an eventual need sooner. And none of them came "from space". Since then, there's been some discoveries in materials science from weightless environment experiments, but again, those are not commercially viable products. They're one-off discoveries that may, or may not, find a way to be made in a gravity well.

The shipping and handling fees from SPACE ALONE would be prohibitive. Sciencing isn't going to break a lot of new ground, though there are probably some discoveries that can still be made there. The question is, to what end? "You can't know until you try" doesn't pay the bills. It actually interferes with paying the bills almost all the time because a good number of experiments intended to take advantage of a weightless environment don't translate to an environment with gravity.

The future you want APPEARS to be running in Star Trek World to me. The practical aspects of it are missing - funding, costs, returns, benefits, goals, hell, even human nature. Mankind did NOT evolve in space. We evolved in a gravity field, and space, itself, will kill a human just from the weightlessness alone, given enough time.

And least you think I'm just some old fuck nay-sayer, I grew up in the Space Age. It was magical, seeing all this new stuff doing new things every time something flew. But over the many decades since the 1960's, the nature of space has been better understood, and explored, and poked and prodded. I'm sure there are DISCOVERIES to be made of enormous scientific benefit. But if you're looking at funding a global economy based on space shit, keep looking. That can't happen. It's not fiscally viable as things stand now.

And the way things are going, it won't be, ever.

At least not for mankind. Mabe in a few million years the cockroaches will have better luck.

You have a hopelessly earth centric view. If (hopefully when) we move off planet it will be gradual. Products made off earth will be used off earth. Some things we build on earth now will be built off planet. The earth’s gravity well is too deep. It won’t be a global economy but a solar system economy. IMHO.

 

[JohnDeL]

Back in the day, we did have a few runs where probes were built on common buses (e.g., the Pioneer series, the Ranger series, the Explorer series). It worked because each set of probes was going to similar places to do similar things and was launched shortly after each other; for example, there were eight of the "Able" Pioneer probes sent to the moon between 1958 and 1960.

So, yes, we could develop a common bus for probes going to Venus and another bus for probes going to Mars and another bus for probes going to Jupiter and... But this ignores the other problems of time and money.

First, there's the time element. Those earlier common buses only worked because we sent a lot of probes in a short amount of time. Nowadays, we're lucky to send a new probe to a given target every five to ten years. Partly because there are so many targets but more because there is so little money. So think about what your cell phone looked like five years ago. What your internet speed looked like. What the new cars had as standard equipment.

The point is that technology changes a lot faster than we launch. So what was a good bus at the start of a five year run of probes might be hideously out-of-date by the end of that run.

The other problem, as always, is money. We could triple the amount of money going to NASA deep space probes and it still wouldn't be enough to launch a series of probes to every item of interest in the Solar System, simply because there are so darn many items of interest in the Solar System. But unless we spend more money, we won't be able to do this cheaply enough to justify common buses. And if you look at the current administration's goals of shutting down most of NASA's probes, we are exceedingly unlikely to spend enough money.

 

[SkyeFire]

How come we don't include venus in our plans. Cheaper to get to

Not really. For the same reason it's not easy to "just" throw spent stages or dead satellites into the sun. Energetically Venus is more expensive to get to than Mars.

Would love see a mission to deploy a dirigible to Venus to do some long term monitoring and analysis of the mid atmosphere and map the surface from there.

If you're in those clouds, you're not going to get much solar power, or see much (or any) of the surface optically. Trying to map the surface from the air will require radar and substantial power.

Keeping clear the sulfuric acid cloud layers will also be an issue.

Maybe drop a couple more probes to the surface if we find anything looking interesting....even a few minutes of data before melting would be a huge increase in what we know now.

Compared to the few minutes of data we got from the Venera probes?

 

[adingo]

To think that Trump is trying to give / reward 10 billion of our dollars to pay and reward the insurrectionist scumbags that he says our country has wronged. 10 billion of Our tax dollars to idiot treasonous Trumpers. Thats even more than NASA’s whole budget.

It’s $1.7 billion, not 10. Though still stupid at that price.

 

[JohnDeL]

How come we don't include venus in our plans.

You mean like the VERITAS probe (scheduled for 2031, will make multiple InSAR passes over Venus to map geology and measure strain)? Or maybe like the DaVINCI probe (scheduled for 2030, orbiter to measure atmosphere plus lander to sample deeper atmosphere and surface geology)?

 

[compgeek89]

You mean like the VERITAS probe (scheduled for 2031, will make multiple InSAR passes over Venus to map geology and measure strain)? Or maybe like the DaVINCI probe (scheduled for 2030, orbiter to measure atmosphere plus lander to sample deeper atmosphere and surface geology)?

Didn't know about those. Thanks for the pointers.

 

[0xdeadc0de]

Kessler Syndrome can't come soon enough.