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NASA Builds a Cheap Standardized Space Probe
TangAddict writes "Dr. Alan Weston, who previously invented bungee jumping, led a team of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center to build a $4 million spacecraft in less than two years. The Modular Common Spacecraft Bus is designed to accept payloads of up to 50kg. and can be used for a variety of missions including a rendezvous with asteroids, orbiting Earth or Mars, and landing on the moon. When NASA officials saw the first flight test, they offered Weston and his team $80 million to use their design for the LADEE mission, which will gather dust and atmosphere samples from the moon in 2011."
I was just asking.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
This is the first time I've heard of technology that's DESIGNED to gather dust. Usually that just happens by accident.
... $80 million to show how a government bureaucracy can destroy the program, thus proving that NASA should get more funding because space development can't be left in the hands of amateurs. (That doesn't make sense? I don't get it either, but I've seen it happen.)
Yeah, I'm disillusioned. NASA doesn't impress me any more. People working without any connection to (or expectation of reward from) NASA... that's impressive. Ansari X-Prize FTW.
I'd be a lot happier if these guys could go it alone.
An $80,000,000.00 project to gather dust?
.... they offered Weston and his team $80 million to use their design for the LADEE mission, which will gather dust.... Well, if they're just going to let it sit around, I'll take it.How about, lets say, $20M?
"Dr. Alan Weston, who previously invented bungee jumping"
Yeah, and I invented bicycle jumping... and I was a mere 7 years old...
He may have helped (along with some others) re-invent it, or modernize it... but he did not invent it...
Seriously, why didn't they start with this like 20 years ago? Basic platform with propulsion, power and communication, with a few slots for special equipment, like cameras, radars, sample collection, or whatever is needed for that probe?
It's been so long since these guys used common sense in looking at budgets and what they could do with them, it's a damned fine refreshing change.
If only this "lets make the best with what we have while someone else tries to get us more" approach would filter through to more government bodies/groups.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Invented Bungee Jumping? I think you'll discover he invented neither the name or the practice..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungee_jumping
The practice comes from Pentecost Island in Vanuatu (where I have been, and witnessed) with a manhood test involving young men jumping off platforms with vines tied around their feet.
This was adapted by A. J. Hackett in New Zealand to the modern elasticised version, who also gave it the name Bungee Jumping.
Where does Weston like telling people he came into this all?
Suppose you were to ask NASA why they don't provide the complete blueprints for their spacecraft to the general public.. not the launch vehicles mind you, the actual spacecraft - there's no national security concerns here. They'll tell you that they don't *own* the blueprints.. the companies they contract to do. So if you ask them why they don't demand the blueprints when they contract for the spacecraft, they'll tell you that this would cost more. So they're saving money by not demanding the blueprints.
This, of course, is crazy. If they were to demand blueprints from the contractor for the first model of a particular spacecraft and then make those blueprints available to the general public then, the next time they want to contract for a similar spacecraft, they'll find there are a whole mess of companies lining up to bid.. and to bid very low indeed - as they don't have to spend all that money designing a basic spacecraft - they don't have to re-invent the wheel.
As the bids are so much lower, NASA could then start asking for more capable spacecraft.. and quickly a publicly owned repository of blueprints would be built up that all the various contractors could work with.
But instead, we get million dollar spacecraft from the same 3 contractors, over and over again. No standardization, no spin-offs for other purposes.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you check the wikipedia page on bungee jumping, (sorry don't know how to provide the link to the page) there is no mention of Weston. Instead, it says some young men from some random island in Vanuatu used to jump off of cliffs with vines tied to their ankles to show that they are courageous.
Wait, was that like a joke or something?
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
NASA is buying a $4 million satellite from itself for $80 million? That is going to be one awesome $76 million dollar launch party, except for all the rocket scientist dweebs hanging around at it.
> a $4 million dollar spacecraft
So what's a square dollar worth these days?
(this _is_ news for nerds)
You need to know what the Moon is made of before you send Von-Neumann machines to it to bring about our doom.
I'm not sure about the veracity of your statements, but I would conjecture that the blueprints would be nothing more than very cool wallpaper as most craft built to date have been ad hoc creations to house specific instruments with specific needs. The new design will no doubt save money but the instruments will now have to be shoe-horned into that architecture. And that may very well work for the most part.
In addition, here is a site that people should be aware of. It is a database of all the NASA tech that has been spun off into private industry. For instance, JPL developed shake testers to test spacecraft and instruments for their ability to withstand launch stress. Now JPL buys their shake testers from a an outside company.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
It will get hacked, and grow into a race of transformers that come back to earth to take over. I've seen it in the movies. Be very scared!
Table-ized A.I.
Shake tester?
;)
Can I have that job? I like chocolate, strawberry, and marshmallow. I will even eat shakes made with oreos or candy bar chunks.
I think I qualify as an "outside company"
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Around 30 years ago NASA was messing with the Multimission Modular Spacecraft (MMS), which was in use for 10+ years. Some 10 years ago there was a lot of activity around the highly modular SMEX-Lite bus for smaller missions. On the other side of the pond, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. has been doing cheap, highly modular spacecraft buses since the early 1980s. The US DoD and its various contractors have played with the idea at various times in the last couple of decades as well, most recently in the guise of "operationally responsive space" and "plug-and-play spacecraft". Needless to say, the concept is not particularly new. It just waxes and wanes in popularity depending on what kind of tradeoffs between mission cost and mission performance are acceptable.
damn! i guess this project isn't gonna help me with my dream of visiting the moon. but my sister-in-law would fit in it.
Scan to the bottom of this link, and you'll see the budget:
http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=357
$4M for some scuba gear with ambition or $3.5M for the real thing? Hmm...
Have they cleared these for use on ice planets like Hoth? The previous model defended itself valiantly against a group of insurgents before finally succumbing to the ol' "you draw it out and I'll sneak around and nail it from the side" tactic. Lord Vader will not be pleased if the upgrade does not solve this problem.
- The 2 Mars rovers.
- The Mars Vikings.
- The pioneer series.
- The Voyager series.
Etc, etc, etc.The simple fact is, that NASA does tend to use common arch. but it also has it downfall. THe original Mars Polar Lander and the aborted Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander had common arch. Of course the 2001 lander became the new Pheonix, that is inbound to mars as we write.
Even this probe will only be used for a few missions, to as many as 10. But by then, new designs and idea will abound, and it will be discarded.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I guess it will be running Linux, of course.
In Soviet Russia $80M would buy you whole NASA couterpart.
"The Modular Common Spacecraft Bus is designed to accept payloads of up to 50kg.
I've taken dumps bigger than that.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I suppose he will have a bungee cord attached to make the probe automatically return to earth?
When I was younger I expected rockets, as a way of launching objects to space, would be quickly replaced by other means.
Maybe a combination of balloons for the first Kms and some kind of land based laser for the rest?
I don't know, but rockets seem kind of old technology. Like finding musketeers in Civ when you already have tanks.
Otherwise they wouldn't be able to manufacture highly complex microchips, lasers etc simply because western companies were too mean to build the stuff in the west. Naturally all the knowledge the chinese gain from making this stuff will reach the chinese military so who frankly is surprised they're building a GPS rival? And if they're anything like the japanese it'll probably be *better* than the orginal.
In general, it's poor economy.
You see you have the fixed cost of the rocket, launchpad, and launch team. Many tens of millions of dollars. Even if you drove the spacecraft cost down to zero, it won't affect the total very much.
Meanwhile all the cost is at risk if the spacecraft fails.
In general it's penny wise and pound foolish to economize on the spacecraft.
Not everything in this world is the result of a conspiracy. There are national security concerns for anything involving space flight. Any release of technology has to be approved by an export control officer.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's the result of bureaucracy. After several incidents where militarily useful technology was improperly transferred to the wrong people, and heads rolled, they decided to require the approval of an export control officer for all transfers of technology. It's more paperwork, but it's supposed to prevent a repetition of earlier mistakes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I have a couple of projects gathering dust - can I have a couple million?
The moon's _atmosphere_?
Boy, those Apollo astronauts might actually have been up there, what with the waving flag and all!
[Readers are strongly advised to turn their irony detectors on]
Take this statement...
and this one...
and put them together.
Sounds to me like NASA bought a design created by NASA researchers for a mere 20x the cost to make it in the first place?
What the hell?
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
A common satellite bus is a good thing, but it does not constitute a viable spacecraft. Like a transit bus that never carries passengers, it serves no useful purpose. The payload has always been the driving element in any satellite or probe, in schedule, budget and trade-offs. And rightfully so IMHO. I believe that's why a common bus hasn't been succesful in the past. Both NASA and the DoD have tried, but the needs of the payload outweigh the needs of the bus.
The Space Ground Link System, SGLS (note to self: submit wikipedia page in copious spare time) is analagous to a common satellite bus protocol at the physical to network layers and provides some commonality of bus structure for DoD satellites. The upper protocol layers vary but the foundation is the same.
Ask anyone who's worked in the essential, but unglamorous world of satellite control. Their biggest problem is upgrading the control network quickly enough to satisfy all the new requirements of the next big launch. New datalink frequencies, stronger encryption, faster throughput rates, etc. All the while, they have to maintain the capability to control and pamper the oldest bird flying and monitor everything in between.
It's not a bad thing that satellites outlive their design life, but it has to be considered when operating and budgeting for the control network.
Invenio via vel creo
I hope the probe is spherical, because a globe-shaped space device designed to suck up dust would logically be called ... a Dyson Sphere.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I hope NASA is making money off the piss-me-off Accord ads at the beginning of the videos. If not, NASA needs to release their videos under a creative commons license.
It bothers me that a tax supported institution is giving "exclusive" video to Wired so it can run ads in front of it. Ads in the story is OK because Wired wrote the story. I didn't bother reading the story so I didn't bother reading their print ads. The vids were all I wanted to see and I didn't watch any after the first because of the ads.
At least by 1990, NASA, DOD and Fairchild/Orbital used to run a system called "Multi Mission Modular Satellite".
So what have they done? For 4 million they built a prototype that will never work in space? Notice that when they were added to some other project the total real project price was $80M - and I'm not so sure that includes launch vehicle (ie the rocket).
Back in the day, the radio receiver (arguably the most critical part of a satellite) was $2 million all by itself. It had to be radiation hardened (cosmic rays) and work flawlessly for 5+ years. If something really went wrong, the receiver would send the pulses that actually re-booted or reset the other on board computers.
Also satellites that have instruments, like the hubble, need to point very precisely at stars - the instruments to do this are very expensive, the controls that orient the satellites are relatively cheap - but you have to buy extra (redundancy).
Imagine this, the Hubble Space Telescope has to point at a spot in space for long time - once for 1 million seconds ( Hubble Site ) During that period of time, the solar arrays, antennas etc. couldn't move because even the ultra smooth stepper motors they use would have shaken the spacecraft enough to blur the image.
That being said, there are 100s, if not 1000s of neat little projects that potentially save NASA money - like using standard Internet protocols to talk to spacecraft (tweak the timeouts a bit) - which would mean ground stations would use pretty much standard router hardware vs. custom stuff. It good to see some of these ideas get the exposure they deserve.
However, most satellites are designed with requirements for the instrumentation. The rest of the satellite is designed around those requirements. Unless you have a very flexible design in your spacecraft bus, the scientific part of the mission might be compromised.
So this lander might work - how many g's on impact? (err... landing). What is the success chance? Do I take my $50million instrument and put it on a $10 million lander that has a 30% chance of success? Or do I build a $20 million lander that has an 80% chance? or a $30 Million that has 95% chance? If I pick wrong, I'm sure that I will not get another $100 million to fly the mission again. Perhaps a lifetime of research goes down the toilet...
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
Leave it to NASA to pay $80Mil for a $4Mil product.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Wow. $80 million to "gather dust." That's not bad for a government project.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I believe the correct tearm would be improved vine jumping.
He used modern materials to improve what is called vine jumping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungee_jumping
"In the 1950s David Attenborough and a BBC film crew brought back footage of the "land divers" of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, young men who jumped from tall wooden platforms with vines tied to their ankles as a test of courage."
This is not disimilar to the ESA's approach. Their Rosetta probe is a development of a Matra Marconi (now part of Astrium) geostationary communications satellite bus. In turn, the Mars and Venus Express probes both used a design derived from Rosetta, with many subsystems (e.g. power) also shared.
Um, wow. So NASA has finally caught up to nineteenth-century industrial design techniques.
Liberty in your lifetime
But if it is released under a copylefted open licence then private companies can modify and use a proven design for all sorts of projects, and they would have to release their designs as well.
If the basic design is good this could well snowball to real (and open) advances in the space industry.
It doesn't work that way. They don't build NASA spacecraft from blue prints because NASA does not launch enough of the same kind. Every mission is different. Also NASA simmple does not launch many spacecraft. If you look at numbers launched the DoD is a much larger user of space. The Military has missions queued up and lauches at a rather high rate. And they are able to take advantage of this. For example GPS spacecraft are built in "blocks" of identical units. It is not quite an automotice style assembly line but they are built in batches. And then there is the comercial side of space. These guys do a number of launches too. Almost all are communications sats of some kind, direct TV broadcast or what ever. They tend to re-use designs too. But NASA is not in the business of launching more then one or two of each type of mission. When they do launch two they will order them at the same time.
This looks and sounds a lot like what John Carmack is doing at Armadillo. Except Carmack's development has focused a lot on engines and these guys seem to be skipping that step.
I have to wonder how flight software developed around a mock-up using pressurized air is going to fair when migrated to a live system with a conventional rocket engine. Especially the fact that they're developing the software indoors. How will they test/account for wind shear and other weather effects?
In 18 months they've created a frame, put a couple SCUBA tanks in there with a nozzle/valve they can control remotely. I'm sure any mech. engineer student could do the same and in probably less time.
The problem if modular spacecraft has aways been the same: If you build a general purpose bus then almaost alwas you find that it is over-built for any one specific mission. If you build a bus the is mission specifi it will always be lighter and cheaper. The modular bus has to support all kinds of payloads and hande the worst case of power and mass. It is kind of like saying the "Standard car" will now by a full size pickup truck with an extended cab. It will seat six people and haul 1,000 pounds of cargo. But what if the mission is to drive one person to work? OK so you change the standard an make it a mini-copper. Put now what if you really do need to deliver some lumber to a construction site.
Now imagine that gas cost not $4 per galon but $100,000 per galon. At that price it would be worth building a special car for every trip and then throwing the car away after just one trip. This is what NASA does because the operational and luach cost is so much higher than any other cost
NASA also works off a fix mass budget. If the bus is 1 pound to heavy that means one pound less fuel can be loaded which translates into reduced lifetime in space or maybe the one pound saved could be used in improve an instrument.
In effect NASA is payinf more then $100K per galon for gas. I think it costs about a million dollors a mile to get to space, at those prices it pays to custom design each spacecraft to it s optimized for each mission
I guess you've never heard of a something called a vacuum cleaner? I hear they're really useful for collecting dust, food crumbs, paperclips, rubberbands and lot's of interesting things.
And of course that site doesn't list the technologies that would have been developed anyway and the technologies that weren't developed because of how NASA expended its resources. The fallacy here is that the benefits are easy to point out (even if it turns out to be hard to put a value on them), the costs, particularly opportunity costs, are not.
Is the lead scientist on this project named Zefram Cochrane?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Err...how is that relevant to the discussion at hand? If you're saying they're better than NASA because of it, you're not even comparing apples and oranges. It's more like apples and toasters.
On the one hand we're talking about a satellite bus that manages structural loads, cooling, power, and propulsion for a payload, built by full-time engineers and proven in their actual conditions of operation. One the other hand, you're talking about mono-propellant rockets built largely with volunteer labor and not having flown more than a few hundred feet.