Challenges to Enabling a Richer Planetary Exploration Program

This week has brought to the fore two challenges for NASA’s managers as they try to enable the richest possible mix of coming planetary missions.  At stake are whether the agency will be able to select two (the default is one) Discovery missions from the current competition, and whether there will be the possibility of a mission selected for Enceladus and/or Titan in the next decade.

When I write these blog posts, it is always more fun to write about the exciting science or clever engineering solutions than to write about policy.  Often, however, the richness of NASA’s planetary science program hangs on questions of management and policy.  Can NASA’s managers find the flexibility in spending to allow the selection of two Discovery missions?  Can they find a way to incorporate new scientific discoveries and a changed political landscape (a new Congressional mandate) in between Decadal Surveys?  This is not glamorous stuff, but it is the essential background to what missions we’ll see in the coming decade.

The Discovery question probably is the simpler because it likely “only” involves solving a $150M or so problem.  For this low cost ($450M) program, the space agency is currently conducting a competition among five finalist mission proposals.  These competitions are expensive to conduct and arduous for both the agency and the proposers.  As a result, NASA’s managers would like stage the competitions no more frequently than approximately every four years.  To increase the number of missions flown, the agency would like to select two missions that would be launched two years apart, allowing a total of five launches in the coming decade.  (This plan assumes that each competition provides at least two proposals that after extreme scrutiny are scientifically compelling, technically feasible, and can be done within the cost cap.  It also assumes that the currently planned future budgets are provided by future Presidents and Congresses.)

In the current Discovery competition, NASA’s managers will select one or two missions from among three asteroid and two Venus mission proposals.  Credit: NASA

The wrench in this plan is the two-year delay in the previously selected Discovery mission, the InSight Martian geophysical station.  As you’ve probably heard, the key instrument for this mission wasn’t ready in time to allow the planned launch this year.  Instead, under a just announced new plan, the mission will lift off in 2018 when Earth and Mars next align for launch.  As a result of the delay, the costs of launch and operating the mission that had been planned for the next two years are pushed out to 2018 to 2020.  This is when NASA wants to start development on the next one or two Discovery missions.  In addition, a substantial group of engineers and scientists need to be paid from now until launch in 2018 to fix the instrument problem and retain the core group needed to prepare the mission for launch and flight.

When NASA’s director for its planetary science program, Jim Green, announced the new InSight plan at a recent meeting, one of the earliest questions was whether or not this meant that NASA would still be able to select two Discovery missions.  An article on the journal Nature’s website poses the same question.

NASA has not formally released an estimate of the additional costs required under the new plan, saying that those figures will be available this coming August.  At a recent meeting, the InSight mission’s principal investigator stated that flying the mission later would cost $150M.  It’s not clear from his statement what all is included in that figure.  NASA had ~$150M budgeted for InSight for the next two years to cover launch and mission operations.  Those costs will need to be shifted out two years.  There will also be new costs for the 2016-2017 period to fix the instrument and to keep the core team together, and it’s not clear if this spending is included in the $150M estimate.
Because the federal budget operates on a cash basis, any money not spent in the current fiscal year returns to the treasury.  So NASA can't simply bank the money it had planned to spend in 2016-2017 and spend it two years later.  The agency’s managers may have some flexibility, though, subject to many rules that I don’t pretend to understand in any detail:

NASA may be able to sign long term contracts with an outside company or organization (which would include the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is developing and will later operate the InSight mission).  In some cases, money committed to a contractor counts as spent by the government when the contract is signed but the contractor can spend the transferred money later. 

NASA’s managers may be able to shift money among projects.  For example, they might be able to spend money in the next two years originally earmarked for InSight on the Mars 2020 rover project.  Then in 2018-2019, the agency might be able to spend money originally planned for the rover on InSight.

The $150M is less than half of what NASA is projected to be spending on Discovery mission development per year by the end of the decade.  In theory, delaying the start of the next Discovery mission(s) by around six months might solve the cash flow problem and allow the selection of two Discovery missions.  Jim Green has said that mission timing will be crucial, and all the teams currently in the Discovery competition have been asked to identify alternative launch dates.

I am convinced that NASA’s managers would like to fly InSight and select two new Discovery missions if fiscally possible.  The kinds of options that I've mentioned above probably just scratch the surface on the kinds of ideas they are exploring.  We will know more when NASA’s managers release the final budget plan for InSight this August and when they announce in late this year whether or not they selected one or two new Discovery missions.

In the meantime, veteran space reporter Jeff Foust has tweeted that Science Mission Directorate head John Grunsfeld (Jim Green’s boss) told him that the option to select two missions is still on the table.  We can hope that he and his managers find a solution to select two.

The other problem, how to enable missions to Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus may not have such a clean path to a resolution.  A spate of new discoveries have raised interest in exploring these worlds as possible abodes of life.  These discoveries caught the attention of key members of Congress who have directed NASA to establish an Ocean Worlds program to explore these two moons along with Europa.  (There are other ocean moons in the outer solar system, but they are less likely to be abodes of life or would be harder to explore.)

The Congressional mandate directed NASA to explore these worlds through a mixture of low-cost (Discovery program), medium cost (New Frontiers program, ~$850M), and high cost (Flagship, >$1B) missions.  Planning for a Europa mission with a Flagship mission is underway (although there’s no agreement on when the mission should launch).   NASA is left to find a way to send new missions to Titan and Enceladus to fulfill the Congressional mandate.

Unfortunately, neither of these moons was highly ranked as targets by the most recent Decadal Survey, which represents the consensus of the scientific community on exploration targets.  (Europa was highly ranked.)  The Survey examined missions to land on the lakes of Titan and decided that the scientific return for the estimated approximately $1B cost was not high enough.  A mission to orbit Titan, land on a lake, and fly a balloon was estimated at an astronomical cost of $6.7B.  Mission concepts, primarily orbiters, were examined for Enceladus, found to be expensive at $1.9B and were not a priority at that cost.

Fortunately, mission concepts such as multi-flyby spacecraft instead of more expensive orbiters have been more fully developed, giving mission planners lower cost options.  In recent competitions for Discovery missions, two teams have proposed multi-flyby missions to fly through Enceladus’ plumes to search for clues to habitability and in one of the proposals to also map Titan’s surface at higher resolution.  A third team proposed a lander for a Titan lake.  All of these proposals were for missions at a fraction the cost of the Decadal Survey cost estimates for similar (but to be fair, more capable) missions. 

Unfortunately, per a comment by Green at a recent meeting, while these Discovery missions proposed compelling science, they were judged by reviewers of being unlikely to fit within the Discovery cost cap.  Green implied that similar missions could fit within the New Frontiers budget cap (further implying costs substantially lower than their Decadal Survey cost estimates).

Given NASA’s current budget level and missions in development, the agency has no ability to add another major Flagship mission to the queue of missions before the mid-2020s.   That leaves NASA’s New Frontiers program as the only potential home for an Enceladus and/or Titan mission in the next ten years or so.  But there’s a problem using this program, too.  While Discovery proposals can target any world in the solar system except the Earth and sun, candidate missions for the New Frontiers program competitions were pre-selected by the Decadal Survey.  The list was carefully examined to ensure that the missions are scientifically compelling, affordable, and balance the wide interests of planetary scientists.  Because NASA is mandated to follow the Decadal Survey in setting its priorities, the list of recommended missions carries weight.  One purpose of the list is to prevent teams from lobbying outside the Decadal Survey for their favorite New Frontiers candidates to NASA’s senior managers and Congress.  (There’s no mechanism to prevent Congress from imposing its favorites on NASA, though.)

For the fourth New Frontiers competition that is in its initial stages, the Decadal Survey reports said that a mission should be selected among these candidates.  Credit: NASA

 

For the fifth New Frontiers competition, currently planned for the early 2020s, the Decadal Survey recommended that two additional missions be added to the list of candidate missions.

NASA has just begun the process of starting the competition to select the next New Frontiers mission from among the candidates, with a target launch in the mid-2020s.  The agency’s managers decided to add a mission to Enceladus and/or Titan to the list of candidate missions.  Many scientists within the planetary community are not happy with this addition.

Last week, I listened in on the first day a meeting (the Planetary Science Subcommittee) of senior scientists discussing the issue with Jim Green.  Their main objections boiled down to several points:

The New Frontiers current list was developed by the entire community and NASA’s managers should not arbitrarily change it.  At a minimum, the addition should be vetted before the mid-term Decadal Survey review planned for next year.  Doing otherwise undermines the credibility of the Decadal Surveys.  Green’s response was that given the timing of the Congressional mandate and the planned start for the next New Frontiers competition, a discussion in the mid-term review wasn’t feasible.  It was either now or wait for yet the next New Frontiers competition that would start in the early 2020’s.  In Green’s words, the timing of the mandate sucked because it limited his ability to consult with the broader scientific community before having to tell the community what missions they could propose for the competition.

Many are concerned that rather than being an open competition, an Ocean World’s selection is pre-determined.  There’s no point to teams proposing the other candidate missions.  Green’s response was that NASA will run a clean competition.

Why these two moons and not Pluto or the asteroid Ceres where there have also been exciting new discoveries?  Green’s response was that there are no credible New Frontiers-class follow up Pluto missions and teams have yet to propose cost-capped Ceres missions, but he expects them in the future.

At this meeting, scientists reported on discussions in analysis groups representing specific planetary science disciplines.  Perhaps predictably, the report for the outer planets group was enthusiastic about the addition while reports for the small bodies and Venus groups – which have candidate New Frontiers missions – were troubled to upset by the addition.  The Mars group – which has no New Frontiers candidates – was silent on the topic.  The report from the lunar group – which has two candidate missions – was also silent on this topic, but this group meets the least frequently of the analysis groups and simply may not have had a chance to caucus and decide either way.

As the discussion on adding Enceladus and Titan to the New Frontiers candidate list continued, it became more nuanced.   A few of the scientists wondered if an Enceladus/Titan proposal would be competitive given the lack of a mature list of scientific questions and design concepts.  The Decadal Survey carefully defined the scientific goals for the missions on its candidate list.  In addition, most of the missions on the New Frontiers candidate list have been proposed before or have similar Discovery proposals to draw on.  Green noted that Enceladus/Titan proposals would also have Discovery proposals to draw on.  He said that NASA was working on a plan to define the scientific goals for an Enceladus/Titan mission for this competition.

Green also talked more about NASA’s choices in response to the Congressional mandate.  NASA’s managers could decide to consider a mission to these moons to be a strategic mandate outside of the Decadal Survey’s recommendations.  The agency is planning for a Mars orbiter in the early 2020’s as a strategic mission to provide a communications relay to future missions, follow up on scientific questions raised since the last decadal survey, and prepare for future human missions.  In a similar vein – and this is my speculation and wasn’t raised by Green – the agency could decide to substitute the selection of a planned New Frontiers competition in the early 2020s for a strategic Ocean Worlds mission.  Instead, the agency has chosen to add a mission to the Saturn’s moons to the New Frontiers candidate list where it must beat out five other candidates on compelling science, feasibility, and cost.

NASA’s managers take the advice of the planetary science community seriously.  They are actively seeking the response to their decision to add Ocean Worlds to the New Frontiers program (and at the same time selling their proposed solution).   No one in the meeting I listened to stated that they questioned the scientific importance of Enceladus and Titan.  However, several would appeared to believe that these two worlds should compete in the next Decadal Survey (to be released in the early 2020s) for a place as prioritized missions.  NASA's managers are arguing that the time is now to recognize their priority.  

 
This is a conversation likely to take at least a few weeks if not months to play out. 

As I said at the beginning of this post, these issues aren’t glamorous.  They are simply the nuts and bolts issues NASA’s managers face as they work to create the richest possible program of planetary exploration within the resources the President’s budget office and Congress provide them.

Appendix: At the Planetary Sciences Subcommittee meeting, NASA's Jim Green presented these slides to make his case that and Enceladus/Titan mission should be added to the New Frontiers candidate list.  The final slide is from the Small Bodies Analysis Group (SBAG) arguing that any addition should be made follow a review by senior members of the planetary science community.

Congressional language directing the creation of an Ocean Worlds program that would include Enceladus and Titan.

Key discoveries at Enceladus since the priorities for the last Decadal Survey (in its Visions and Voyages (V&V)) priorities were set.

More Enceladus discoveries

Titan discoveries.

SBAG's statement on how new candidate missions should be added.

Proposed 2017 planetary budget: Great except for Europa

It’s clear that the President’s budget officers really don’t want to fund a mission to Europa.  Other than that, the proposed Fiscal Year 2017 budget submitted by the President last week to Congress would be great for planetary exploration.

The submission of the Fiscal Year 2017 proposed budget is just the opening move in getting to what will be NASA’s actual budget for next year.  The proposal itself is the result of negotiations between the budget managers in the President’s Office of Budget Management and the space agency’s senior managers.  Most of the proposed NASA budget is a simple continuation of the 2016 budget.  In the few areas like Europa where the administration and Congress differ on policy, though, there are significant changes from this year’s budget.  In the next step in the process, committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate will make changes to portions of the budget to reflect their priorities and then will negotiate their differences.  Eventually a spending bill will be passed and signed by the President.

The proposed NASA planetary exploration budget would fund a fleet of current and planned missions include Discovery and New Frontiers missions expected to be selected in the next few years and several CubeSat missions (latter three not shown).

Excepting Europa (more on this later), there’s a lot to like in the proposed planetary budget.  Following successive years of cuts early in the decade and a gradual series of increases to rebuild the program, the top number for the FY17 planetary program is proposed to be $1.52 billion.  With the proposed cut to the Europa mission studies, this number is down by $110 million from this year’s FY16 budget.  

The $1.52 billion would:

• Fully fund the continued development of the 2020 Mars rover and support the selection and development of new missions for the low-cost Discovery program and the mid-cost New Frontiers program.
• Fully fund all missions currently in flight or operating at their target worlds.  Unlike the previous couple of years, the budget doesn’t propose to end the Mars Opportunity rover or the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions.
• Provide slight increases for the programs that fund planetary science research and develop technology to be used in future missions.

With the proposed budget, we should see a number of new planetary missions launch in in the 2020s starting the launch of the ~$2.2 billion Mars 2020 rover. 

If the funding levels suggested for the beginning of the 2020s were continued through the next decade, then NASA should be able to launch several low-cost (~$450 million) Discovery missions.  The budget proposal specifically talks about the desire to select two missions from the Discovery competition in progress to launch in 2021 and 2023.  The head of the Planetary Science Division, Jim Green, has said he’d like to hold competitions approximately every four years and select two missions from each competition, resulting in a new mission approximately every two years.  That would support the launch of around five Discovery missions in the 2020’s.

The budget supports the launch of a mid-cost (~$850 million) dollar New Frontiers mission in the mid-2020s.   Dr. Green has said that he and his managers are planning for launches approximately every five years going forward, meaning that we should see two missions fly in the 2020’s.

NASA also plans to regularly fly several low cost (a few million dollars each) of the cereal box-sized CubeSat spacecraft to lunar and planetary destinations.

The budget would also fully fund NASA’s contributions to the European Space Agency’s 2016 ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, 2018 ExoMars rover, and the JUICE Jupiter system mission that will arrive in the late 2020’s.

NASA has also talked about a new orbiter for Mars for the early 2020’s, although the budget is silent on funding for this mission.

And then there’s the Europa multi-flyby (previously called the Europa Clipper) mission.  While previous Presidential budget proposals have called for this mission to launch in the mid to late 2020’s, this budget proposal seems to call for a possible delay in that vague schedule by suggesting a “launch as early as the late 2020s”.  The proposal ignores language in the FY16 budget law (which governs spending only for this year) inserted by Congress directing NASA to launch the mission by 2022 (and that also directed NASA to add a lander to the mission, which also is ignored in this new budget proposal). 

The stark difference between what the President’s budget proposes and what would be needed to launch the Europa mission in 2022 is shown by the numbers in the following table (both sets of numbers are provided in the budget proposal document).

	FY17	FY18	FY19	FY20	FY21
Proposed spending	$ 49.6M	$ 24.2M	$ 65.2M	$117.5M	$236.5M
Required to launch in 2022	$194.0M	$272.0M	$456.0M	$678.0M	$482.0M

Under the President’s proposal, $493 million would be spent on the Europa mission through 2021 versus the $2.1 billion needed to keep the mission on track to launch in 2022.

In political terms, pushing the mission’s launch out a dozen or more years may be the equivalent of postponing it forever.  For the mission to fly, it would need continuous support from at least two more Presidential administrations and as many as six to eight new Congresses.  It’s hard to imagine any mission sustaining support for that long.  It’s also hard to imagine how NASA could keep a high caliber engineering and science team together for what might be fourteen or more years (with a possible six or seven additional years of flight following launch to arrive at Europa).  On a very practical engineering level, many of the technologies available to design into a mission today will be obsolete and no longer available by the late 2020s.  The mission design would need to be continuously tweaked to substitute new technologies.

Why might the President’s budget officials be opposed to the Europa mission?  The explanation given in the proposal document is that launching a Europa mission before the late 2020’s would lead to an unbalanced planetary program that would not support the program laid out in the last Decadal Survey.  This statement assumes that the cap on the total planetary budget would remain fixed at around the $1.5 billion proposed for this year.

Here are the possible explanations I’ve been able to think of for the Administration’s lack of support for the Europa mission (the first two are consistent with the explanation in the budget document):

Delaying the Europa mission prevents a bulge in spending requirements.  For the rest of this decade, NASA’s new mission spending is dominated by the expensive Mars 2020 rover.  The budget proposal also shows sharp budget increases late in the decade for the Discovery and New Frontiers programs.  Launching the Europa mission by 2022 as mandated by Congress would require either greatly increasing overall planetary funding or cannibalizing other programs.  (Note: I would like to see a much larger planetary budget.)

The budget officials (and perhaps NASA’s senior managers) prefer cheaper Discovery and New Frontiers missions to the Flagship Europa mission.  Experience has shown that large Flagship mission are more likely to have large cost overruns that play havoc with NASA’s budget.  Countering this, the generous money that Congress has provided the mission so far as matured the design much more than is typical at this stage of development.  That maturity makes cost overruns less likely.

Europa isn’t Mars, and studying and eventually getting humans to Mars is NASA’s current overriding goal.

Pure politics.  Several of the Congressional leaders who are strongly backing the Europa mission and planetary exploration in general are highly conservative politically.  While they favor spending more money on planetary missions, they also want to cut funding for missions for NASA to study the Earth, especially climate change.  Essentially proposing to push out the launch of a Europa mission to forever may be part of a hardball negotiating tactic to trade more funding for the Europa mission for also fully funding the President’s generous proposed budget for Earth science missions.

At the moment, we are left with the Europa mission as a formally approved mission on NASA’s books with an engineering and science team, a selected suite of instruments, and no target launch date.  The interesting politics will be whether or not Congress forces the addition of the many hundreds of millions of dollars into NASA’s planetary budget over the next several years needed to launch as early as 2022 without cannibalizing other planetary programs.  (For more on this, see this previous blog post.)

The Europa mission isn’t the only areas in which the Administration and Congress disagree on NASA budget and policy.  While outside the scope of this blog post, they also disagree on the amount that should be spent on Earth science (as noted above), developing commercial launch capabilities, and developing the Orion and Space Launch System programs.  

Outside of these areas, though, there is a consensus on spending levels, and the final budget is likely to be similar to the proposed budget.

SpacePolicyOnline has a very good summary of the overall NASA budget and areas where the Administration and Congress are likely to disagree.  For the planetary program, Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society has good commentary on the proposed planetary budget. 

Budget Details

Each budget proposal comes in two parts.  The first proposes spending for the next fiscal year (FY17 in this case) and is the starting point for the eventual law allocating funding for the next year.  The second part projects notional funding for four additional years (FY18 to FY21 in this case).  These notional budgets are not acted on by Congress, but provide agencies with guidance for future years.  For agencies like NASA whose projects typically take several years to implement, these notional budgets take on particular importance.  The agency cannot issue multi-year contracts that are inconsistent with the notional out year budgets.  These creates a problem if, for example, Congress provides generous funding for the Europa mission next year but the notional budgets are inconsistent with the necessary multi-year contracts.

The numbers for the following charts come from NASA’s budget documents except as noted.         

 

The FY17 budget proposal projects a onetime significant increase in the Earth Science budget to pull in development of the next Landsat Earth observing satellite.  The dip in planetary science funding comes primarily from proposed reductions in funding for the Europa mission.  Otherwise, the budget proposal shows relatively flat projected budgets for NASA’s science budgets.

 

This chart shows projected budgets for budget proposals since 2010 (which proposed the FY11 spending) compared to actual allocated budgets.  For the first several years of the decade, the budgets proposed reduced planetary spending, reflected in cuts in actual spending.  Since the FY14 budget proposal, projected budgets have been increasing.

Within NASA’s planetary program, the budgets that fund current and future missions show projected shifts in future years as development of the Mars 2020 rover mission nears completion.  Funding shifts to the low-cost (~$450M per mission) Discovery program, the mid-cost (~$850M per mission) New Frontiers program, and the outer planets program, which includes the Europa mission.   Final funding levels at this level of detail haven’t been set for FY16, and I show estimates in this chart and the next from Casey Dreier and Jason Davis with The Planetary Society.

NASA’s planetary budget also includes two essential programs that funds scientists to analyze the data returned by NASA’s planetary missions and to develop technology for future missions.  The latter is proposed to take a one-time hit to reflect a cut in spending to develop technology for future Europa missions.  Otherwise, both programs are projected to have approximately flat funding for the remainder of this decade.