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Next-Gen Mars Rover Mission Delayed 2 Years, To 2011
Riding with Robots writes "NASA announced today that the Mars Science Laboratory, the agency's next Mars rover mission, is now slated to launch in 2011 instead of next year. 'We've reached the point where we can not condense the schedule further without compromising vital testing,' said NASA's director for Mars exploration. The length of the delay is driven by the fact that the orbits of Earth and Mars only provide a favorable flight window every two years."
I meant to mention that NASA is not the only agency planning future Mars rovers. The European Space Agency is planning the ExoMars mission. (It's facing its own delays, until 2016 in this case.)
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
Delays and ballooning expenses: some reform at NASA is in order...
Looking back, one thing that scientists wish they had is the imaging technology of the 90's...or even now.....back when they first launched Voyager in the 70's. Heck, computers too.
Now I'm NOT playing the "what if" game, but it helps keep our chins up when things look down.
They now have 2 years to make it better, faster, more efficient, etc.
Except cheaper. Too late lol.
The most Illustrious Council of Elders has issued an update concerning the recent lack of activity from the Blue World. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, spake thus:
When a dissident journalist suggested that recently-deciphered transmissions suggesting that a combination of economic instability and general technological backwardness among the blue worlders might also account for the observed lack of activity from the enemy homeworld, K'Breel thanked the journalist for his great courage in volunteering for the next infiltrator mission, and had him sent to the nearest genetic re-engineering facility, where the process of gelsac inversion would begin.
In recent months NASA has proven that there are glaciers of water-ice just sitting under a thin layer of soil. Water-Ice is/was the #1 reason to go looking there. (Yes looking for signs of past life is a big % too, but bear with me.)
Why continue to send probes there (unless they are the terraforming type) when we could/should be sending probes to Europa or Titan to look for living life in the water under the ice.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
More like irrelevant broken link..
A two year delay of a car delivery? What will the Martians think? Those Detroit assholes are an embarrassment to Earth.
How could this possibly be off-topic?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I was a little worried when I noted in the article that the author was a disguntled ex-NASA employee. Then I realized who the author was: former Science Mission Director administrator Alan Stern. He's the guy who earlier this year was lambasted by NASA higher-ups and Slashdotter's alike for pulling the plug on the ailing Spirit Mars Exploration Rover to save a few million dollars. His decision was forcibly reversed, and being out of favor he resigned. Given my enthusiasm for the rover program, I find my mildly surprised to be sympathetic to his bitterness. He had a limited budget that was too small to support his growing assignments. In a way his decision about Spirit might have been a good thing, because it drew a lot of fast attention to the issue...but he got torpedoed for it and then the attention died away again.
The problem of delays and ballooning expenses is not an easy one. The mission teams aren't spending their days seeing how far fire extinguishers can propel them down a hallway on an office chair and doing a little bit of development work when it suits them. They're very frequently working their tails off and on overtime, and Homer Simpson walking by wearing Tom Landry's hat isn't going to magically inspire them to greater efficiency.
The main problem as I see it is that engineers and scientists generally suck at estimating work, and accountants and managers generally suck at understanding technology development to do much better. Add in the fact that cost presented is a big factor in which missions get chosen over all the other candidates, and you've got recipe for severely lowballed estimates.
Stern is suggesting a really painful fix, and I'm not sure I like it. Cancelling missions that are overbudget or schedule is a hard thing to do. He's right that the "we've spent too much to stop" argument is incomplete, and he's right that supporting wayward projects further encourages poor management, but that's only part of the picture. MSL was originally considered to be worth the $1.4 billion it was approved for. The true sunk-cost argument isn't that we've spent too much to stop now, it's that a mission that was worth $1.4 billion is definitely worth $700 million. We've spent the $1.4 billion, and we can't get it back either way. However, looking at the issue anew, for $700 million we can get a $1.4 billion probe.
But that's only one mission, it still allows the problem to recur, and it stealthily and unequally replaces the question, "Is this mission worth $2.1 billion?" with two questions, "Is this mission worth $1.4 billion?" and, "Is this mission worth $700 million?"
I really wish I had a good counterplan to Stern's argument that we should cancel missions that go overbudget and schedule, but I don't. I like to think that an independent NASA auditing group of experienced engineers and bean counters who don't have direct stake in mission selection would result in better initial cost estimates, but I'm not confident of it. Figuring out how much work inventing something new will take is a lot harder than figuring out how much work making something that's been made before like a car will take, and NASA already attempts this to a degree.
By the same token, I'm not sure Stern's plan will work. It might fail to spur better estimations of scope. Its only accomplishment in that case would be the cancellation of a lot of good projects after a lot of investment with nothing to show for it. The two missions he calls out most deliberately, MSL and the James Webb Space Telescope, are two of the most anticipated, by scientists and civillians alike, science missions on the board for the next 10 years. It would be a shame to kill them and not only fail to get any science return, but fail to fix the problem.
(That's where I soaked the keyboard in beer. One Martian year...) K'Breel and the Council are a /. institution, and so long as someone comes up with something new for them on every Mars thread, the spirit of TripMaster Monkey lives on.
Now sit rover, wait, wait. Good Satelite!!!
Such things have been proposed. Europa's a pretty darn hostile environment, though, radiation wise. You're talking needing MegaRad hard parts, for instance. And soft landing is no easy matter either.
It could easily cost a couple gigabucks to do it.