In a previous post (http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2008/11/warring-views-on-msl.html) I printed excerpts from letters on the problems that MSL is facing. NASA is working to keep the launch of this mission on track for 2009. There will be budget hits -- still unspecified -- to other programs in NASA's science program. I am sure that NASA will structure the hits to minimize the overall pain, but there an expectation of pain to come.
Alan Stern, former NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate has written a reply to Dr. Garvin's reply to Stern's original letter. The reply is printed in the subscription only publication Space News. A core issue in all the letters is whether the Mars Science Laboratory represents a major increase in cost over what the community of scientists expected when they recommended it as a high priority.
NASA has several scientific bodies it uses to get recommendations on its scientific programs. Some, such as the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) are on-going. Some, such as the Decadal Survey met for a period at the beginning of the decade to review the overall program and then disbanded. Ultimately, however, NASA as a government agency, has the ultimate responsibility and authority to decide which advice to accept and which to reject. That said, my observation is that NASA listens to these bodies and tries within its budgets to follow the advice (and the sum of the recommendations always seem to call for more missions than there are dollars).
So what advice was NASA receiving regarding MSL in the early to mid parts of the decade? The Decadal Survey (2003 report), which looked at the entire planetary program, made MSL a priority but with the expectation that the cost would be ~$650M (a medium-sized mission). The goals of the mission were limited: "The MSL mission may be important, indeed essential, as a technology-demonstration precursor mission to MSR [Mars Sample Return], but the panel saw little science for MSL that cannot be done as well or better by [ohter] missions [such as Mars sample return]. The detailed examination and analysis of rock samples can be done far more capably in terrestrial laboratories (though admittedly MSL could perform simpler analyses of a larger and more dispersed set of samples than those that an MSR mission could return)... Since the panel’s task was to prioritize science missions and since it sees MSL largely as a technology demonstration mission, it has not included MSL among the prioritized missions."
MEPAG, on the other hand in a 2002-2003 report saw the MSL as a very capable science mission: "MSL will investigate the carbon chemistry in near-surface rocks and soil and provide a rigorous and definitive examination of their mineralogy as well as the extent to which they were formed or altered by water. Later missions in this Pathway will build upon this foundation of investigations and provide much more definitive tests for evidence of past life than will be possible from MSL and earlier landed missions. Advanced in situ instruments are expected to conduct biomolecular chemical analysis and higher spatial resolution examination of samples. The technology to acquire difficult-to-access samples, such as those buried several to tens of meters below the surface, will also be developed."
Both review bodies saw Mars as being the focus of at least one flagship class ($1-2B) missions in the period of ~2009-2020. The Decade Survey assumed it would be a Mars Sample Return (ball parked at $1.5B) and MEPAG saw it as MSL (and several less defined follow-on large missions). NASA decided that MSL was to be a highly capable science mission focused on exploring a site for past habitability and possible chemical signs of post life. The initial cost estimate for this mission after its detailed definition (after both the reports quoted above) was ~$1.5B. It's interesting to note that ESA's ExoMars rover was initially scoped as a ~650M euro mission that has grown to ~1.2B euro mission as it too focused on assessing habitability. (MSL now is probably ~$2.3B, but it is a much more capable rover with precision landing capability.)
NASA's science budget for planetary exploration is largely fixed with some variation from year to year. Fitting a highly capable MSL mission into that budget has to come at the cost of developing other missions to other targets. Is this a case of the Mars science community hijacking the planetary budget? Mars has been the recommended focus of NASA's planetary program for a long period. You can view NASA's planetary program as Mars-focused with funding for a limited number of other solar system missions, or as a balanced program badly out of balance as Mars dominates the budget. It probably depends on whether or not your scientific research focuses on Mars.
What follows are a portion Dr. Stern's views from his reply to Dr. Garvin apropos to the discussion above:
"Dr. Garvin claims that MSL’s original $650M cost, assigned by the NRC’s Planetary Decadal Survey when it ranked the mission high enough to proceed in 2003, was naïve. I agree here: any mildly experienced scientific program manager could have recognized this fact. Yet neither NASA headquarters, nor the implementing NASA center (JPL), nor the Mars community, came forward then, pointing out this obvious disconnect. As a result, the NRC’s community based Planetary Decadal Survey ranked MSL highly at an advertised cost level of $650M. Had they known its ultimate cost would be in excess of triple that, and the consequent damage that would result to the rest of the US planetary program to fund such increases in a fixed-budget environment, I believe it is doubtful that MSL would have received the same high ranking. NASA, JPL, and the Mars community abused the NRC’s high recommendation for MSL by “running away” with the mission’s ambitions and cost after it received a high ranking at the $650M level. When retailers practice such predatory practices, it is called “bait and switch.”
"MSL is a fine scientific mission, and I hope it works, for the fate of the US Mars program lies at its feet. But MSL has caused a great deal of damage to NASA’s broader planetary program: all that remains in hardware development are just one lunar and one outer planet mission; and by NASA’s own recent reckoning, even those two missions and portions of the planetary research and analysis programs which produce scientific discoveries are endangered now by MSL’s spiraling cost."
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Future ESA Science Budgets
Space.com has a long article on the results of the European government meeting that set out forthcoming European Space Agency (ESA) budgets: http://www.space.com/spacenews/spacenews_summary.html
Highlights:
- Core science budget will get 3.5% annual increase, which is not expected to keep up with inflation. Impact on ESA's ability to launch future science missions depends on the actual inflation rate.
- Replacement copies of the Kopernikus/Sentinel Earth observation satellites will be built, ensuring continuous measurements as the initial satellites in the system age. This is very big news for the Earth observation community.
- Preliminary approval was given to an expanded ExoMars mission. ESA is looking to fund 850M euros with another 200M euros needed from international partners such as Russia or the United States. This apparently will require some scaling back of the current 1.2B euro plan.
Highlights:
- Core science budget will get 3.5% annual increase, which is not expected to keep up with inflation. Impact on ESA's ability to launch future science missions depends on the actual inflation rate.
- Replacement copies of the Kopernikus/Sentinel Earth observation satellites will be built, ensuring continuous measurements as the initial satellites in the system age. This is very big news for the Earth observation community.
- Preliminary approval was given to an expanded ExoMars mission. ESA is looking to fund 850M euros with another 200M euros needed from international partners such as Russia or the United States. This apparently will require some scaling back of the current 1.2B euro plan.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Warring Views on MSL
Science magazine today published a letter from James Garvin, former chief scientist of NASA's Mars exploration program. Garvin strongly disputes Alan Stern's position on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) budget increases.
First, here are the latest public information as to the full cost of MSL. From a Science article on 9/25/08: "The science laboratory, currently slated for launch in the fall of 2009, is four times heavier than the current rovers trundling across the planet's surface. It features a plethora of advanced tools and instruments designed to analyze rocks, soil, and atmosphere. But that complexity has led to technical troubles and higher costs. When proposed in 2004, the lab was expected to cost $1.2 billion. By this summer, that price tag had climbed to $1.9 billion, and last week NASA space science chief Edward Weiler warned that "there is another overrun coming." Another NASA official put the latest increase at approximately $300 million."
Here is Stern's view from his letter to Science (10/31/08): "When the National Research Council's Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission for priority funding, it assigned a cost level of $650 million. This value, rather than $1.4 billion, is the true metric for seeing the deep damage that MSL's profligately overrunning cost--now likely to top $2.1 billion--has inflicted on NASA's Mars and wider planetary science budget. Also, the story focused its overrun discussion on instrument costs. Although certainly part of the problem, instrument cost increases have been considerably smaller than overruns in the rest of MSL's budget, which was severely mismatched to the project's complexity from its inception. This mismatch sowed the most fundamental seeds of MSL's cost problems."
And Garvin's view from today's Science: "Stern also claims that MSL was "assigned" a cost level of $650 million. He fails to mention when and by whom. The $650 million cost was a placeholder assigned to a medium-class Mars rover mission by the National Research Council Solar System Decadal Survey committee in 2002, before NASA had developed a basis of cost estimate for MSL. This served as input to NASA studies from 2000 to 2004 to fully define the MSL mission and culminated in the competitive selection of its science payload in late 2004.
"At that time, the overall mission was baselined at a cost of $1.4 billion, not including several costs associated with the radioisotope power system. Given the experience with the cost of the Mars Exploration Rovers and the increased scientific and technical scope of the MSL mission, the so-called assigned value of $650 million is not credible. Stern's own New Horizons flyby mission to Pluto cost NASA more than $650 million; it is unrealistic to expect that a 700-kg analytical laboratory that must soft-land on Mars and drive around with 100 kg of scientific instruments could possibly cost less than a planetary flyby mission.
"Indeed, MSL's 2 years of intensive surface science operations are difficult to compare to any missions in the $650 million price class given typical science-per-dollar metrics. The established NASA cost to implement MSL as of the time of its confirmation review was $1.55 billion (August 2006), which grew due to NASA-wide issues with thermal protection system materials in 2007 to approximately $1.7 billion. The total cost growth of the MSL mission development since NASA confirmed the mission is typical of other Mars exploration missions successfully flown over the past decade. The cost to fly MSL in 2009 will be less than the cost (in today's dollars) of flying a nonmobile Viking Lander laboratory to Mars, and MSL includes a whole new generation of instruments and mobility."
My take is that the two letters talk past each other. ~$2.1B for a rover of MSL's capability is seems a fair price and money well spent for the science (and joy of exploration) that it will return. However, when the mission was fit into a roadmap of science missions by the Decadal Survey, it was as a $650M mission, which would have represented a modest increase in funding (on a per rover basis) over the MER rovers ($820M (per Wikipedia) for two rovers). The difference between that initial guesstimate and the likely final cost is $1.65B. The important question in my mind is whether or not the Decadal Survey would have included MSL in its roadmap if it has assumed that the true cost was >$2B. For only the cost difference, NASA could have flown 3 Discovery missions, 3 Scout missions, 4 MER rovers, or two New Frontiers missions. The problem appears not to be with the management of the MSL program, which as Garvin points out, has experienced cost increases in line with other Mars programs. The problem is with the way mission costs are estimated for Decadal Survey type exercises. NASA took the priorities of that Survey and retained them after it was clear that the cost estimate used in the Survey was off by over a factor of 2X. MSL went from a medium-class to a flagship-class rover. As I said, MSL will be money well spent for the science it returns. However, the Decadal Surveys will be meaningless exercises if they costs they assume in recommending the pieces of the roadmap are off by such large amounts.
First, here are the latest public information as to the full cost of MSL. From a Science article on 9/25/08: "The science laboratory, currently slated for launch in the fall of 2009, is four times heavier than the current rovers trundling across the planet's surface. It features a plethora of advanced tools and instruments designed to analyze rocks, soil, and atmosphere. But that complexity has led to technical troubles and higher costs. When proposed in 2004, the lab was expected to cost $1.2 billion. By this summer, that price tag had climbed to $1.9 billion, and last week NASA space science chief Edward Weiler warned that "there is another overrun coming." Another NASA official put the latest increase at approximately $300 million."
Here is Stern's view from his letter to Science (10/31/08): "When the National Research Council's Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission for priority funding, it assigned a cost level of $650 million. This value, rather than $1.4 billion, is the true metric for seeing the deep damage that MSL's profligately overrunning cost--now likely to top $2.1 billion--has inflicted on NASA's Mars and wider planetary science budget. Also, the story focused its overrun discussion on instrument costs. Although certainly part of the problem, instrument cost increases have been considerably smaller than overruns in the rest of MSL's budget, which was severely mismatched to the project's complexity from its inception. This mismatch sowed the most fundamental seeds of MSL's cost problems."
And Garvin's view from today's Science: "Stern also claims that MSL was "assigned" a cost level of $650 million. He fails to mention when and by whom. The $650 million cost was a placeholder assigned to a medium-class Mars rover mission by the National Research Council Solar System Decadal Survey committee in 2002, before NASA had developed a basis of cost estimate for MSL. This served as input to NASA studies from 2000 to 2004 to fully define the MSL mission and culminated in the competitive selection of its science payload in late 2004.
"At that time, the overall mission was baselined at a cost of $1.4 billion, not including several costs associated with the radioisotope power system. Given the experience with the cost of the Mars Exploration Rovers and the increased scientific and technical scope of the MSL mission, the so-called assigned value of $650 million is not credible. Stern's own New Horizons flyby mission to Pluto cost NASA more than $650 million; it is unrealistic to expect that a 700-kg analytical laboratory that must soft-land on Mars and drive around with 100 kg of scientific instruments could possibly cost less than a planetary flyby mission.
"Indeed, MSL's 2 years of intensive surface science operations are difficult to compare to any missions in the $650 million price class given typical science-per-dollar metrics. The established NASA cost to implement MSL as of the time of its confirmation review was $1.55 billion (August 2006), which grew due to NASA-wide issues with thermal protection system materials in 2007 to approximately $1.7 billion. The total cost growth of the MSL mission development since NASA confirmed the mission is typical of other Mars exploration missions successfully flown over the past decade. The cost to fly MSL in 2009 will be less than the cost (in today's dollars) of flying a nonmobile Viking Lander laboratory to Mars, and MSL includes a whole new generation of instruments and mobility."
My take is that the two letters talk past each other. ~$2.1B for a rover of MSL's capability is seems a fair price and money well spent for the science (and joy of exploration) that it will return. However, when the mission was fit into a roadmap of science missions by the Decadal Survey, it was as a $650M mission, which would have represented a modest increase in funding (on a per rover basis) over the MER rovers ($820M (per Wikipedia) for two rovers). The difference between that initial guesstimate and the likely final cost is $1.65B. The important question in my mind is whether or not the Decadal Survey would have included MSL in its roadmap if it has assumed that the true cost was >$2B. For only the cost difference, NASA could have flown 3 Discovery missions, 3 Scout missions, 4 MER rovers, or two New Frontiers missions. The problem appears not to be with the management of the MSL program, which as Garvin points out, has experienced cost increases in line with other Mars programs. The problem is with the way mission costs are estimated for Decadal Survey type exercises. NASA took the priorities of that Survey and retained them after it was clear that the cost estimate used in the Survey was off by over a factor of 2X. MSL went from a medium-class to a flagship-class rover. As I said, MSL will be money well spent for the science it returns. However, the Decadal Surveys will be meaningless exercises if they costs they assume in recommending the pieces of the roadmap are off by such large amounts.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Space.com on Europa flagship mission
A summary of the mission (with a long description of the unsuccessful attempt to find a way to include a Europa lander) is at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/081127-am-europa-ejsm.html
And to all the American readers, Happy Thanksgiving.
And to all the American readers, Happy Thanksgiving.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Juno Mission officially approved
The Juno New Frontiers mission to Jupiter has been officially approved: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-222
I'm a big fan of this mission. It will be one of those quiet missions -- not a lot of public pizazz -- that will greatly deepen our understanding of gas giants. This mission will probe Jupiter's interior in multiple ways to determine key ratios of elements, the magnetosphere, and the deep structure. It will also study the upper atmosphere and auroras. There will be wide-angle photos of at least the poles. (I'm hoping they can take pictures of the cloud deck near perijove. Since the orbit carries the craft near the terminator, the clouds near sunset should be spectacular -- if such shots from a spinning craft flying past the planet are technically possible as anything but a smear!). No meaningful photos of moons. Just solid science on a key type of planet.
You can read more at the mission's website: http://juno.wisc.edu/
I'm a big fan of this mission. It will be one of those quiet missions -- not a lot of public pizazz -- that will greatly deepen our understanding of gas giants. This mission will probe Jupiter's interior in multiple ways to determine key ratios of elements, the magnetosphere, and the deep structure. It will also study the upper atmosphere and auroras. There will be wide-angle photos of at least the poles. (I'm hoping they can take pictures of the cloud deck near perijove. Since the orbit carries the craft near the terminator, the clouds near sunset should be spectacular -- if such shots from a spinning craft flying past the planet are technically possible as anything but a smear!). No meaningful photos of moons. Just solid science on a key type of planet.
You can read more at the mission's website: http://juno.wisc.edu/
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