Flagship and Competed Missions

19 March 2015

The Cold War Ends

• Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defense Initiative put pressure on security, technology and economic performance in the USSR

• Gorbachev’s Glasnost (openness) led to more public criticism and unrest in the Soviet bloc

• Client states in Eastern Europe broke away: German reunification in 1990.

• Soviet Union became the Russian Federation

The Peace Dividend• With the end of the Cold War, a basic purpose of the

space program was removed• Defense and space advocates scrambled to find new

justifications: NASA ‘science’ and the ISS; Life on Mars• The promised ‘peace dividend’ never materialized• Peace dividend is a political slogan popularized by US

President George H.W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1990s, purporting to describe the economic benefit of a decrease in defense spending. It is used primarily in discussions relating to the guns versus butter theory. The term was frequently used at the end of the Cold War, when many Western nations significantly cut military spending

Space Exploration Initiative•President George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) was for many a process of rediscovery. In the November 1989 90-Day Study report, their first major statement on how to carry out SEI, NASA planners described an elaborate and costly scheme to construct a lunar base using modules and equipment delivered atop unmanned landers. Construction gangs of astronauts would use a high-tech bulldozer or grader to prepare the ground and an “unloader” to lift the modules off the landers and position them on the surface. After assembly, a high-tech end-loader or “snow-blower” would bury the modules under lunar dirt to provide radiation shielding.•SEI’s high estimated cost and consequent chilly reception in Congress, combined with NASA’s growing realization that an excessively large number of spacewalks would be needed to assemble and maintain its modular, Space Shuttle-launched Space Station Freedom (SSF) in low-Earth orbit (LEO), drove SEI planners to seek a new lunar outpost concept that would cost less and require as little lunar surface assembly as feasible. They hoped that such an outpost might serve as a stepping stone between early brief lunar sorties and the 90-Day Study‘s vision of a complex constructed base. The outpost concept they found was, however, not new; it was, in fact, a generation old.

How to do more with less?

• Replace large, expensive space science missions with small focused missions proposed and led by scientist Principal Investigators: PI-led missons

• Explorer and Discovery missions were the first, now most new missions are in this style, including larger New Frontiers missions

• Faster, cheaper, better approach

Faster, Cheaper, Better• If there is one phrase that characterizes former

Administrator Goldin's approach to running NASA, it was the phrase "Faster - Better - Cheaper". While no one could ever seem to explain this management mantra such that all three terms were given equal importance, it soon became clear what it really meant to implement FBC was less money. Indeed, the 'faster' and 'better' you were at cutting costs, the more bragging rights you could exert. The twin Mars mission disasters in 1999 provide a classic illustration.

• In the September 1999 edition of JPL's in-house newspaper "JPL Universe", just before two JPL-managed spacecraft slammed into Mars, the flight operations manager for the Mars Climate Orbiter said: "It's going further and faster with fewer people and with a smaller budget. If we're successful, I think we'll raise the bar on the whole faster, better, cheaper mantra to a new level - to a level that's not been attained by anyone else."

Faster, Better, Cheaper Beer?

Competed Missions

• Can be selected to reduce and contain the costs and risks

• Have genuine science objectives, although limited

• NASA and its centers retain the ultimate authority (this is appropriate for public funds)

• Record shows that they also experience significant cost growth, for similar reasons: poor planning, mistakes, new developments

• Record shows very few are ever cancelled.

Flagship Missions

• In the old style: “the last of the dinosaurs”• Large objectives, large teams yield major

results• High cost estimates and often over-runs• Hard to cut back on objectives:– De-scoping is not efficient– Existing constituencies can lobby effectively

Flagship Missions

• Galileo• Cassini • Curiosity

New Frontiers Program•The New Frontiers Program represents a pivotal step in the advancement of solar system exploration. The missions in the program tackle specific solar system exploration goals identified as top priorities by consensus of the planetary community. •The New Frontiers strategy is to explore the solar system with frequent, medium-class spacecraft missions that conduct high-quality, focused scientific investigations designed to enhance our understanding of the solar system. The program objective is to launch high-science-return planetary investigations on an average of one every 36 months. Added to the NASA budget for the first time in 2003, New Frontiers builds on the innovative approaches used in NASA's Discovery and Explorer Programs.

New Frontiers Missions

• New Horizons (Pluto flyby)• JUNO (Jupiter orbiter)• Osiris-Rex (Asteroid sample return)

Discovery Program • NASA's Discovery Program gives scientists the

opportunity to dig deep into their imaginations and find innovative ways to unlock the mysteries of the solar system.

• When it began in 1992, this program represented a breakthrough in the way NASA explores space.

• For the first time, scientists and engineers were called on to assemble teams and design exciting, focused planetary science investigations that would deepen the knowledge about our solar system.

• As a complement to NASA's larger “flagship” planetary science explorations, the Discovery Program goal is to achieve outstanding results by launching many smaller missions using fewer resources and shorter development times.

• The main objective is to enhance our understanding of the solar system by exploring the planets, their moons, and small bodies such as comets and asteroids. The program also seeks to improve performance through the use of new technology and broaden university and industry participation in NASA missions.

• NASA's Discovery Program (as compared to New Frontiers, Explorer, or Flagship Programs) is a series of lower-cost, highly focused American scientific space missions that are exploring the Solar System. It was founded in 1992 to implement then-NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin's vision of "faster, better, cheaper" planetary missions.

NASA Discovery Missions• Mars Pathfinder • NEAR Shoemaker • Lunar Prospector • Stardust • Genesis • Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) • MESSENGER • Deep Impact • Dawn • Kepler • Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, (GRAIL) • InSight Mars lander

Titan surface

New Horizons

New Horizons assembly

Dawn on launch pad