Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Standard practice is to design for the worst case scenario

How to Lower the bar and increase science success probability
Gary — (archived)

Chris Vancil said:

"Any time you try to lower the "Bar" you are chancing a failure. But if you want more missions then lower costs are needed."

Again, I have to trot out my "massively cloned" MER hobby horse. Most of MER's cost was in the engineering development. That's now a sunk cost which should be fully exploited. The proposed Mars Science Lab (MSL) will be a single vehicle with a program cost at almost a billion dollars. MSL will use the technically risky "sky crane" concept to get the rover onto the Martian surface. Many people (myself included) believe MSL will auger-in if JPL sticks with the sky crane. For the billion dollars that will be spent embedding MSL's wreckage into the Martian surface, NASA could send many cloned copies of MER. NASA should hire Lockheed-Martin to create an Iridium style assembly line to crank out MER clones at greatly reduced unit cost and then launch them in groups of four with big ELVs like the Atlas-V and Delta-IV. I've done some back of the envelope calculations on this and believe that we could get 12 MER clones on the Martian surface for the cost of a single MSL. By sending many MERs to Mars, we could be super aggressive about landing site selection and attempt sites that would never be considered with a singleton mission.

Gary

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