My apologies for having posted so infrequently lately. I had a deadline for submitting a paper to a
journal, and that consumed all my time and energy. The paper is in, and I plan to post more
regularly.
I’ll start my new series of posts with a report of the key issues
raised at this week’s OPAG meeting. Next
post will describe an upcoming planetary mission.
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While predicting the future is always a risky business, I’ve been
seeing clues that NASA and the planetary science community are moving towards a
new way of constructing mission portfolios.
The cause of the move is familiar to anyone who follows this blog or
space news in general: NASA’s budget for planetary exploration has shrunk each
year for the last several years. Good
news in future years may be flat budgets, and further cuts are quite
possible. The planetary science program
is caught between political forces that want to reduce the overall government
budget and NASA’s own priorities that put this program fairly far down the
list. (Higher up according to news
reports: Operating the International Space Station, developing the next human
spaceflight system, completing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and the
Earth science program.)
For the last two days, I’ve listened to portions of the Outer Planet
Analysis Group’s (OPAG) meeting. This is one of several groups of scientists that
meet once to twice a year to review NASA’s plans for their corner of the solar
system. OPAG’s members fear that they
are witnessing and end of an era. After
the Juno Jupiter mission and the Cassini Saturn missions end within months of
each other in 2017, NASA has no plans for future missions to the outer solar
system. While the concepts for a mission
to Europa keep getting better, there’s no way to fit these $2 billion missions
into any foreseeable budget.
The meeting participants had long discussions about how hard it is to
fit an outer planet mission into the Discovery program. Reaching Jupiter typically takes five years
and Saturn seven years, at a cost of around $5-7 million per year in mission
operations. Subtract that from a mission
budget of $425-500M, and it’s hard to have a science return that competes with
missions that take months or a year or two to reach their targets. (Rendezvous missions to comets and non-near
Earth asteroids face a similar problem.)
Hopes for a new outer planets mission that would fly in the next decade
rest on the results of the single Discovery and single New Frontiers
competitions likely to occur later this decade.
The competition from other destinations will be stiff. New Frontiers competitions are limited to a
preselected list of missions, and the only outer planets candidate will be a
Saturn atmospheric probe mission. (The
rest of the list includes a comet sample return, a lunar sample return, a
mission to the Trojan asteroids, and a Venus lander. For the competition after that, an Io and a
lunar geophysical mission are planned to be added.)
During the OPAG meeting, there was considerable talk about how to
expand the list of outer planet candidate missions. The approved list came from the Decadal
Survey performed earlier this decade.
Here, the politics of the Survey put the outer planet community at a
disadvantage. They only had so many
missions they could propose for consideration, and two of those were for very
large (>$4B) Flagship missions to Jupiter-Europa and Saturn-Titan and a
third was for a more modest ($2B) Uranus orbiter. These missions were considered when it
appeared that NASA’s future budgets would support at least two Flagship
missions, in additions to a new Discovery mission every two years and a New
Frontiers mission every five years. Now
it looks like Discovery missions will come every five years and New Frontiers
missions every seven years.
Several times, the talk at the OPAG meeting returned to how the
community would have looked harder at New Frontiers-class missions to the Jupiter
system, Titan, and Uranus if they could have foreseen the new budget realities.
In the new budget reality, Flagship missions seem to be out; Discovery
missions put large parts of the solar system at a competitive disadvantage; and
many of the outer planet community’s highest priority targets aren’t on the New
Frontiers list. A NASA official at the OPAG
meeting referred to the recently announced $1.5B 2020 Mars rover as New
Frontiers class. Historically, anything
over $1B has been considered a Flagship mission, but the intent seems
clear. While the budget cap may be
flexible, New Frontiers-class missions are the new big mission class.
In the 2020’s, the situation may not be much better. NASA recently put out a request to industry
for information on future launch upper stages for planetary missions for “the
potential for a Mars mission every two years along with an additional science
mission every three to five years beginning in the 2017 time frame,” http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/asd_12_20_2012_p03-02-530846.xml
(Note: I’d prefer a 50-50 split between missions to Mars and the rest of the solar
system.)
The budget squeeze on Flagship missions isn’t unique to NASA’s
planetary science community. The
recently completed heliophysics Decadal Survey called for a focus on more
frequent smaller missions en lieu of
future large missions. The astronomy and
astrophysics community has planned on a Flagship mission to study dark matter
and search for exoplanets to follow JWST.
NASA now is wondering if that is politically possible and has
commissioned a study to examine a new Probe-class program of ~$1B missions for
this community. http://www.spacenews.com/article/nasa-hedging-its-bets-as-it-looks-past-james-webb-telescope
If something around $1B is the new cap for missions, then NASA’s
mission classes will come to resemble those of the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA structures its science program into Large-
(~$1.2 B) and Medium-class (~$625 M) missions and into a separate Mars program
where each individual mission falls into similar price ranges. (There’s also a Small-class program that is
~$50M.) ESA and NASA account for mission
costs differently, so the Large- and Medium-class missions are roughly
equivalent to planned budgets for the New Frontiers and Discovery programs
respectively. NASA’s science budget is
expected to be larger than ESA’s, so the United States should fly more
missions, but they would be of a similar scope to those of Europe.
If this change comes to pass, then several good Flagship mission
concepts will not fly, at least in the coming decade or two. But there are a plethora of good ideas for
missions in the lower price ranges. However,
the planetary community in its Decadal Survey still counted on Flagship
missions, so the list of missions that were considered for the New Frontiers
may not represent the best pool to pick from in the coming decade. (This varies by community. For comet, asteroids, and the moon, no Flagship
missions were considered. For the outer
planets, Mars, and Venus, Flagship missions were assumed.)
The OPAG members spent considerable time talking about whether to ask
NASA to add outer planet candidates to the list for the next New Frontiers
competition expected later this decade. The
consensus at the end of the meeting seemed to be that this was likely to be
politically awkward – should the list be re-opened for all other communities,
too?
Congress requires a mid-term assessment of decadal surveys, which would
come around 2016 for the planetary community.
That seems to me a good time to review and possibly expand the list of
New Frontiers missions. That likely
would be too late for the next New Frontiers selection but would be well before
the first selection in the 2020s.
In the meantime, the OPAG members were discussing whether to ask NASA
to raise the cost cap for outer planet Discovery proposals by ~$5M for each
year that would be spent in transit to the destination. In the past, NASA has offered to raise budget
caps for proposals using selected new technologies. If the flight-time adjustment were extended
to all proposals so that proposals for comets and asteroids could also benefit,
this seems fair to me. Without a change
similar to this, hope for a continued NASA presence in the outer solar system
after 2017 rests on the results of the fiercely competitive New Frontiers competitions
planned to occur every seven years or so.
Thank you for that update.
ReplyDeleteSeeing how NASA's budget is continuously shrinking, do you believe that the private sector could come up with a business model to do planetary research and invest one to two billion dollars into such awing projects?
Chris.
@Chris:
ReplyDeleteWhile unaware of any business models you propose, I do think sufficient public pressure could compel government support for space exploration to move toward alignment with public priorities.
In fact, I just posted a video explaining this need for public pressure in relation to starship related research at http://youtu.be/M6wsUf1OUok