[HN Gopher] NASA's Europa Clipper Launch
___________________________________________________________________
NASA's Europa Clipper Launch
Author : belter
Score : 173 points
Date : 2024-10-14 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| consumer451 wrote:
| Alternate streams with commentary...
|
| Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAixoyE78rE
|
| NASA Spaceflight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JUn8LmGYEA
| (This is not an official NASA stream)
| diggan wrote:
| And for people who prefer text:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/10/14/europa-cli...
| ralfd wrote:
| > The journey to the Jupiter system is expected to take five
| and a half years, arriving April 11, 2030, for four years of
| observations.
|
| See you in five years!
| imzadi wrote:
| Cool, I finally have something to live for
| dotancohen wrote:
| Hopefully we'll see humans back on the Moon, and cheap
| reusable human-rated spacecraft on Mars, before then.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Spaceflight Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZjszhRVo9s
| whitehexagon wrote:
| The NASA+ stream died for me "404 The cosmic object you were
| looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon." I much
| preferred the old IBM stream they used to use. Shame, but at
| least it sounds like the launch was a success.
| sidcool wrote:
| Are the side boosters going to be recovered?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No. All cores expended in this launch.
| benjismith wrote:
| Nope. They needed the maximum amount of thrust from those
| boosters in order to propel the spacecraft toward Jupiter, so
| they couldn't save enough fuel for the boosters to land
| themselves. This was the 6th flight of these boosters, so we
| thank them for their service!
| linotype wrote:
| Is this one of those things that's limited by physics or at
| some point will these kinds of missions be doable with a
| mostly reusable setup?
| malfist wrote:
| It's the tyranny of the rocket equation. The more you send
| up, the more fuel you need to send up and then you need to
| send fuel to lift that fuel and then fuel to lift that fuel
| and so on.
|
| Since you have to have a burn to slow down and land you
| have to carry extra fuel to recover. That's always going to
| be the case, but starship is making strides towards
| minimizing that as much as possible with belly flops and
| chopsticks
| alfiopuglisi wrote:
| It's a limitation of the Falcon Heavy, the launcher used
| this time. A future, more powerful one could do it while
| being reusable.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, a bigger rocket could carry this particular payload
| while being reusable. But for any rocket there will
| always be payloads it can't carry while also having
| enough fuel to land.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That constraint can be significantly mitigated by in-
| space refueling. Then it just becomes a matter of what
| the rocket can lift into a stable orbit.
|
| Edit: Not that this applies to any currently operational
| rockets.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's limited by physics: if a reusable rocket can carry a
| maximum payload of X tons, it can only be reused when it
| carries a payload of X/N tons, and (1-X)/N as extra fuel.
| How large X and N are of course depends on the rocket
| design, but N is always going to be greater than 1.
|
| So, for any rocket, flying it reusably is going to mean not
| using the full capacity.
| perihelions wrote:
| It's an engineering tradeoff of payload vs. booster cost.
| It's heavily one-sided for this launch--you get 4x more
| payload to this interplanetary orbit with the expendable
| Heavy vs. the reusable one [a].
|
| Future launches with Starship, analogous to this one, would
| refuel their upper stage in orbit to their full capacity,
| so there would be no performance downside to recovering
| boosters; you would need more launches, but they would all
| be reusable.
|
| [a] https://elvperf.ksc.nasa.gov/Pages/Query.aspx (I
| queried for a high-energy orbit with a C3 of 42 km^2/s^2,
| which I think is correct, or at least very close)
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Also with starship launches only needing about a million
| dollars in fuel, it makes a ton of sense to just launch
| fuel to orbit versus sacrificing an entire ship
| mmooss wrote:
| It's limited by physics: Recovering the rockets requires
| counteracting gravity, which requires energy. If the energy
| is needed for something else - in this case for additional
| propulsion - then it's not available for recovery.
| ls612 wrote:
| They traded off the expense of expending a whole Falcon
| Heavy against the benefit of having additional delta-V to
| get to Jupiter faster.
| stetrain wrote:
| You could build a larger re-usable rocket that could launch
| this payload and still have margin for recovery, such as
| the in-development SpaceX Starship.
|
| However for this type of mission that would still leave the
| question of "What if we skipped re-usability and paid more
| to expend the launcher? Could we launch a larger payload
| and/or get there faster?"
|
| The trajectory for this mission was already a slower
| transit time than the alternate plan of launching it on the
| SLS rocket. I think for some missions that are infrequent
| and targeting far-away destinations there will always be a
| desire to maximize performance at the cost of reusability
| on that singular launch.
| pedrosbmartins wrote:
| Not this time, only the payload fairing.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It's wild that the only thing they recover is the last thing
| they jettison!
| SonicScrub wrote:
| Lightweight enough to be recovered via parachute system,
| unlike the big heavy boosters which need thrust!
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Per NASA, no
|
| _> Because Europa Clipper needs a lot of energy to start it on
| its interplanetary trajectory to Jupiter, the rocket for this
| launch will be fully expendable, with the exception of a
| recoverable fairing. This means that there will be no return of
| first-stage boosters for this launch. Although SpaceX has flown
| a fully expendable Falcon Heavy before, this is the first time
| that NASA's Launch Services Program is launching a mission for
| the agency with this Falcon Heavy configuration, though the
| program has extensive experience now with both expendable as
| well as reusable rockets. In addition to not recovering any
| boosters, technicians removed components only needed for reuse
| to increase the performance of the rocket, to launch the
| largest planetary spacecraft NASA has ever developed and give
| it the power it needs to travel to Jupiter._
|
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/europaclipper/2024/10/14/nasa-launch-...
| imglorp wrote:
| That's awesome flexibility. I'm guessing that meant they
| could omit landing legs, whatever powers them, and anything
| to do with engine re-pressurization and restart. Any extra
| fuel for boostback and landing can now go into S2 delta v.
| wolf550e wrote:
| They also removed the gridfins and their engines.
|
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/europaclipper/wp-
| content/uploads/site...
| moffkalast wrote:
| The suspiciously clean white areas on all three boosters where
| the landing legs have been removed are good indicators of
| what's planned.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Veritasium video on the Clipper probe/mission:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJO_9auJhJQ
|
| Real Engineering:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzKkBOUvsAY
|
| Probe named after the sailing ship design:
|
| > _The etymological origin of the word clipper is uncertain, but
| is believed to be derived from the English language verb "to
| clip", which at the time meant "to run or fly swiftly".[2]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper
| stoneman24 wrote:
| Not common but I have heard "moving at a fair clip" to describe
| speed in commentary and conversation.
|
| Perhaps the term hasn't quite died out.
| payamb wrote:
| ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
| imzadi wrote:
| They haven't given me my monolith, so no contract established
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| can't wait to try some tasty Europafish
| mmooss wrote:
| ETA is 2030. Originally planned for a rocket (SLS) which would
| have delivered the Clipper in ~3 yrs, but which was decided to be
| not viable for the Clipper (with some lobbying suspected).
|
| How much science is delayed by the extra 2+ years? Looking at the
| 'project plan', is the Clipper's arrival (and delivery of data)
| on the critical path for research? And how much research?
|
| I'm picturing a lot of scientists and research projects waiting
| an extra 2-3 years, and then all the research, follow-on
| missions, etc. also delayed. Essentially, the decision might
| shift everything in this field 2-3 years further away, and then
| centuries from now human habitation of other planets is 2-3 years
| later (ok, a bit exaggerated).
|
| But seriously, maybe it's not on the critical path or doesn't
| impact that much. Is anyone here familiar with the research?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > In late 2015, Congress directed NASA to launch Europa Clipper
| using the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's massive moon
| rocket.
|
| > The SLS was still in development at the time, and would be
| for a number of years to come. Delays with the powerful rocket,
| and the need to dedicate at least the first three SLS vehicles
| to launches for NASA's Artemis moon program, pushed Europa
| Clipper's liftoff date into limbo. (SLS debuted in late 2022,
| successfully sending the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission to the
| moon.)
|
| > The 2021 U.S. House of Representatives budget proposal
| instructed NASA to launch Europa Clipper by 2025, and to do so
| on an SLS "if available." Those two crucial words put the probe
| on a path toward a commercial launch vehicle, which turned out
| to be a Falcon Heavy.
|
| So while the flight time may be longer, at least the entire
| mission is derisked in that it was forced to get off the ground
| instead of wait for an appropriate gap within the SLS's launch
| capacity.
|
| [1] https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-europa-clipper-
| lau...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Using a commercial launch vehicle reduced the cost quite a bit
| (saved a billion on the vehicle itself and another billion by
| not having to design the payload to pass SLS's much more
| rigorous vibe checks). The $2b saved is about 10% of NASA's
| annual budget. The next mission to Titan has a budget of around
| $3b, for reference.
|
| On top of that, there's no guarantee SLS would've actually been
| able to launch on schedule. The program has had a lot of
| setbacks, to put it lightly, and has only launched once so far
| (6 years later than it's original ETA). There's additional
| rockets in production but if it came down to it the manned SLS
| missions would probably get priority for political reasons.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| > (with some lobbying suspected)
|
| The lobbying was from the SLS side. Congress was set on forcing
| Europa Clipper to fly on SLS regardless of technicalities and
| only backed off because the Europa Clipper team made it clear
| they'd want an additional $1B to make the spacecraft able to
| handle the exceedingly rough ride SLS provides. They were
| perfectly happy handing $2B of taxpayer money to Boeing, but
| were unwilling to spend another $1B on science.
|
| On top of that, it's worth considering that SLS wouldn't be
| ready to fly right now anyway. As it stands, they can't even
| manage to build one rocket per year, the Artemis-2 rocket has
| already been delayed to next year, so, Clipper would've
| launched 2-3 years later anyway.
| mmooss wrote:
| You don't think SpaceX did any lobbying? They just passively
| stood aside? Look at this story, about SpaceX, via the
| Project 2025 think tank's FOIA requests, searching for NASA
| employees who has written things critical of SpaceX:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757578
|
| It's really hard to discuss any topic that brushes SpaceX
| tangentially on HN. I asked about the research, not about the
| rockets, but if one even mentions SpaceX in anything less
| than glowing terms they get six (so far) responses re
| rockets, all defending SpaceX, and not a mention of the
| research.
|
| NASA and SLS are actually the property of the people posting;
| their mission is to serve all Americans. SpaceX is a private
| business, whose mission is to serve only itself and, in the
| practice of its owner's businesses, has zero regard for
| everyone else.
|
| In that context it's bizarre that people are fans of the
| latter. In context of social media, where mass influence is
| bought, it's perhaps what we'd expect - that's not NASA's
| business.
| nickpp wrote:
| > private business, whose mission is to serve only itself
|
| Any private business's primary mission is to serve its
| customers - in order to even exist.
| mmooss wrote:
| By theory and - especially these days - by practice,
| private business is there to enrich its owners.
|
| One way it does that is to serve customers, another is to
| manipulate, cheat, and squeeze them of every dime the
| business can get, and then drop them for higher-margin
| customers. Just look at modern business.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >It's really hard to discuss any topic that brushes SpaceX
| tangentially on HN. I asked about the research, not about
| the rockets, but if one even mentions SpaceX in anything
| less than glowing terms they get six (so far) responses re
| rockets, all defending SpaceX, and not a mention of the
| research.
|
| Everyone's just pointing out the obvious fact that SLS
| wasn't going to be able to do the mission on time or at
| cost anyway, so the delays were happening regardless, and
| Falcon Heavy was the only other option. You phrased your
| question with the assumption that SLS was going to launch
| on-time, added in the implication that SpaceX lobbied for
| the launch and caused research to be delayed by a few
| years, then decided to complain that everyone else was
| being biased.
|
| >NASA and SLS are actually the property of the people
| posting; their mission is to serve all Americans. SpaceX is
| a private business, whose mission is to serve only itself
| and, in the practice of its owner's businesses, has zero
| regard for everyone else.
|
| SLS is the property of Boeing, another private business.
| Its mission is to transfer vast sums of taxpayer money to
| Boeing under a contract whose terms remove any expectations
| of good performance and whose use in Artemis is legally
| mandated by Congress for no technical reason. The NASA
| Office of Inspector General has constantly been expressing
| serious concerns over how bad of a deal SLS is for the
| American people. We've also had genuine technological
| progress held back because Congressmen wanted to transfer
| money to SLS. Its ever inflating costs threaten actually
| useful science programs every year. I don't see how anyone
| who actually wants American leadership in space can support
| it.
|
| SpaceX, as you have noted, is also a private business. With
| NASA being one of its biggest customers, they are obviously
| beholden to NASA's desires. Unlike Boeing, who has
| explicitly expressed their intent to refuse contracts which
| properly hold the company responsible for under-performing,
| SpaceX consistently insists on such contracts. Currently,
| they provide most launch services to NASA and have saved
| NASA billions over the years. They maintain a mutually
| beneficial relationship, where NASA gains all sorts of
| valuable data and capabilities from SpaceX's private
| development efforts, and SpaceX gains business from NASA.
|
| If you're dismissing this as a social media influence
| thing, despite all the technical points presented to you,
| then all that shows is that you were just concern trolling
| in your original post and have no interest in actually
| having your question answered.
| jccooper wrote:
| Well, Congress specified it to use SLS, since they were looking
| for extra payloads. And then uncoupled it from SLS when it
| became clear it couldn't even handle one extra payload.
|
| NASA, wisely, always benchmarked the mission on Falcon Heavy,
| and bailed from SLS as soon as they were allowed to.
|
| Clipper on SLS was more of a "wouldn't it be neat" scenario
| than the intended mission design.
| why_at wrote:
| I don't have any special insider information, but from what I
| know about spaceflight I think we should be glad they used the
| Falcon Heavy instead of SLS.
|
| SLS has been consistently delayed pretty much every year since
| its conception, most recently the Artemis 2 mission which was
| supposed to fly this year is now delayed to next. It has only
| flown one time, now two years ago. It's also an order of
| magnitude more expensive than the Falcon Heavy with each flight
| costing upwards of $2 billion.
|
| My guess is if they had been stuck with SLS this mission would
| not get to Europa until significantly later, if at all.
| stetrain wrote:
| This presumes that an additional SLS rocket would have been
| completed and ready to launch in the same timeframe as this
| launch on Falcon Heavy. From what I have seen of the SLS
| program I think that is an unlikely scenario.
| d_silin wrote:
| Damn, I am impressed how nonchalantly the flagship NASA mission
| was using the reused boosters, dirty from soot.
| grecy wrote:
| NASA prefer them now, as they're "flight proven".
|
| They're using them to launch astronauts now too.
| ballooney wrote:
| Nothing nonchalant about it. There was a stringent
| qualification process.
|
| The time between boosters first being reused in Falcons and
| this mission is the same as the time between JFK's 'we choose
| to go to the moon' speech and the actual moon landings.
| proee wrote:
| Cost of the Europa Clipper program is around $4-5 billion. Can
| anyone in the industry shed some light on why these programs are
| so expensive?
| dgrin91 wrote:
| Because it's one shot, must work stuff. They don't build this
| type of equipment often (really ever) because it's all bespoke
| to this mission. That means they need to build, verify, test,
| etc and it all has to work first time because there is only 1
| shot (over a 1 month period) for the launch window
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| I worked on one component of the spacecraft which was a
| derivative of something we've built may times before. However,
| the test program was entirely unique to Europa Clipper, and
| most of the cost was in this bespoke testing. The use of a
| "heritage" component served mostly to lower risk; it did not
| save much cost overall.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Oh cool, someone that actually worked on it!
|
| I was just thinking about how much pressure there must be on
| everyone involved in Discovery Class missions. People's
| entire professional careers, billions of dollars, so much at
| stake!
|
| Is the pressure something significant, or is it spread across
| so many people that there is little trouble sleeping at
| night?
| mandevil wrote:
| The one that gets to me is the Huygens part of the Cassini-
| Huygens mission. Cassini was launched October 15th, 1997,
| Huygens separated from the Cassini carrier on December 25th
| 2004, and landed on Titan on January 14th, 2005. So it was
| in space for over 7 years before it got it's 90 minutes of
| time on the surface. That was actually towards the upper-
| end of expected lifetime on Titan- somewhere between 30-90
| minutes was the expected lifetime of the lander(1). So you
| build and test and test and test (2) for years before
| launch, then the probe travels for seven years in outer
| space, and then it gives you an hour and a half of data and
| that's it. Your entire life for ... 15 years? Resolved in
| 90 minutes. On the shorter end of probe lifespan, it would
| have died before the first signal even reached Earth!
|
| 1: Officially I believe the expectation was "3 minutes" but
| that was a deliberate under-promise so that a success could
| be declared as long as they got any message at all from the
| lander on the surface: I have second-hand accounts that 30
| minutes was what the scientists considered the minimum.
|
| 2: Even with all that testing, disaster almost struck. It
| wasn't until after the launch that someone realized even
| all of this testing had missed something important. The
| radio communications between Cassini and Huygens would be
| affected by the Doppler shift of Huygens hitting Titan's
| atmosphere, which would be unpredictable changes to
| velocity. After launch they had to rejigger when Huygens
| would be launched to a time when the signals would be
| perpendicular to the direction of travel so the shift
| wouldn't affect the radio waves so much that the Cassini
| receiver firmware (which could not be modified after
| launch) could still detect the signals. And also with all
| of that testing, ESA's instructions to the Cassini probe
| missed turning on one channel on the receiver and so half
| of the pictures that Huygens transmitted had nothing
| listening in and were lost.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thanks for that. It made me wonder: who was it? Were they
| in the shower, did they awake from a nightmare?
|
| Here is an HN post from 2014, "How a Swedish engineer
| saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Titan (2004)" [0]
|
| Since the link has rotted away, here is the archive link
| to the IEEE story. [1]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7472495
|
| [1] https://archive.is/3oj6P (archive.org is still not
| working reliably)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Your entire life for ... 15 years? Resolved in 90
| minutes_
|
| I ultimately decided against pursuing a career in
| aerospace engineering after talking to engineers who
| worked a similar time frame on a project only to watch it
| get killed in 30 seconds' debate in Congress.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| >Is the pressure something significant, or is it spread
| across so many people that there is little trouble sleeping
| at night?
|
| When you are on contract for something, you deliver to the
| contract, and are done when you successfully meet the
| customer's requirements. So in that sense you don't have
| the same exposure to the program risks.
|
| However, I've been part of one-off science missions before,
| and there is a different feeling beyond the contract
| obligations, though it's certainly abstracted through the
| many layers of sub-, sub-contracts.
| mandevil wrote:
| And can introduce unusual failure cases for these bespoke
| missions. Mars Observer was lost in flight to Mars three
| decades ago, probably because of the inappropriate reuse of a
| satellite rocket engine. (1) The space environment out around
| Jupiter is really quite different from the environment that
| the JWST is facing around E-S L2 or what the Parker Solar
| Probe is facing right near the Sun. Even if the component is
| spec'd to handle the environment, you need to have actual
| educated humans (read: expensive labor) determine what those
| conditions will be, and then verify that the part will meet
| it, and that's where the money goes- to pay all of those
| humans.
|
| If you built even 15 Europa Clippers the cost per-item would
| come down enormously (because all of those people's work
| could be re-used), but since the 1970's NASA has not had the
| budget for multiple probes per missions. So every mission is
| bespoke, and has to be done again completely from scratch.
|
| 1: The engine was normally used for circularizing the orbit
| of a geosynch comm satellite, so within a few hours of
| flight. For doing a Mars Insertion burn it needed to sit
| fueled for months in outer space, which was not appropriately
| tested, and probably the fuel tank exploded in flight because
| of that.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Yeah. I'm surprised that we don't have a standard deep
| space probe bus by now in at least serial production, at
| least for orbiters if not landers, rovers, and such.
|
| Each mission has unique requirements, but since payload
| mass costs are coming down, ISTM it should be possible to
| create a standard buss that meets most requirements most of
| the rime, even if it's heavier than a bespoke effort for
| any one mission.
| accrual wrote:
| There are somewhat standard busses. Though you're
| correct, many use custom busses for their specific
| missions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_satellite_bus
| es
|
| For example, the SSL 1300 apparently has hosted 118
| satellites so far:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_1300
|
| Though maybe the distinction between "satellite" and
| "spacecraft" bears importance here.
| mandevil wrote:
| For things in Earth orbit (LEO all the way up to GEO) we
| do have some fairly worked out buses that can keep
| commercial missions done on budget within the fairly well
| developed parameters of commercial up to GEO. Have,
| honestly, since the 1980's. Multiple companies from
| multiple countries have demonstrated this, there is a
| competitive market for commsats and earth observing
| satellites (the only two markets where business cases
| really close). If you are doing science from LEO you can
| probably re-use a lot of components from those markets.
|
| For exploration missions and anything in deep space
| (basically, beyond Lunar Orbit) people have kicked around
| ideas for common buses, there have been plenty of
| proposals, but no one seems to have enough value in them
| to be the third or fourth user of one- everyone has found
| it better to start from scratch than use someone else's
| bus design. It is possible if there was a sustained,
| focused effort at one kind of project, say, something
| where Mars orbiter launches were guaranteed every 26
| months for more than a decade, that the investment in a
| common bus might pay off. But as long as we are bouncing
| between Mars, Jupiter, Pluto/KBO's, E-S L2, and inside
| Mercury's orbit, it just isn't actually reusable.
|
| Just as one point, until the past few years everything in
| the outer planets had to be RTG powered, which requires a
| totally different design than something solar. It was
| only with Juno (and now the Europa Clipper) that solar
| has been demonstrated for outer planets at all, and it is
| still not exactly a design you'd have off the shelf, nor
| would the power design you'd want for outer planets solar
| be at all similar to the design you'd want for inner
| planets solar. The same is true for comms, for thermal
| management, for rad-hardening, etc.
| dom96 wrote:
| > So every mission is bespoke, and has to be done again
| completely from scratch.
|
| Is there room here for making things more reusable? For
| example, instead of creating one big satellite with tens of
| instruments, how about they create 10 satellites with one
| instrument each? or would that still be too bespoke to
| lower the cost per item?
| philistine wrote:
| While we now live in an era of abundant rocket launches,
| it used to cost far more to launch with very few launches
| per year.
|
| The whole strategies of exploration haven't shifted yet
| to this new paradigm. Hopefully NASA starts making
| smaller probes and launching them far more often.
| mandevil wrote:
| Europa Clipper is literally the largest thing ever
| launched to the outer planets (so big that Falcon Heavy
| can't be reused for this mission, they have to throw it
| all away in order to get every last jot of performance
| out of the rocket- so this is not an "abundant rocket
| launches" situation- this is a fully expendable rocket
| just like an Atlas V). And the size is not for fun, but
| because going close to Europa (the entire point of the
| mission) means going through the second strongest set of
| EM and radiation belts in our solar system. Even with
| this size- meaning it can have a lot more shielding than
| normal- the probe can only survive a few months of the
| radiation from Jupiter's van Allen belts. The plan is to
| break that few months of exposure up over about four
| years of calendar time, by having it do highly elliptical
| orbits so it stores a lot of data during a close flyby of
| Europa and then transmits that all back to Earth while it
| is far outside of Jupiter's radiation storm, then it can
| head back down and collect more data. And that lengthy
| transmission time is because it is sending information
| from so far away- and has so little juice that the
| effective bandwidth is tiny.
|
| It is possible for a swarm of small satellites to fill
| niches in space exploration. Closely studying Europa
| isn't really one of them with today's technology.
| throwup238 wrote:
| There's also politics at play. Public space agencies need to
| keep the absolute number of failures down to keep funding
| flowing, even if it costs absurd amounts to do it due to
| rapidly diminishing returns. This is especially important to
| flagship missions.
|
| When I took Ae105 at Caltech, the NASA MSL project manager
| explained it like this (I remember the numbers he used
| clearly): a mission might cost $500 million with an 80%
| chance of success, or they can spend twice as much to
| increase the chance of success to 95% by investing a lot more
| in upfront testing and R&D. Now, the smart thing to do -
| given a billion dollar budget - is to take that first option
| because if it fails you can try again and the probability of
| _both_ attempts failing is only 4%, compared to 5% for the
| expensive single mission. Then you've got an 80% chance of
| having $500 million left over for a different mission.
|
| The public and decision makers react irrationally to _any_
| failure, putting funding for other missions and the entire
| program in jeopardy. NASA and ESA have to make some extremely
| suboptimal decisions to make sure that funding doesn't get
| catastrophically cut.
|
| The above is the example the instructor used to easily
| illustrate his point but he said the real numbers are even
| more stark. Often times the cost savings of just building a
| second copy of the payload along with the first means it
| costs $600 million for the first attempt, and only $200
| million for the second (the cost of the launch vehicle and
| keeping people on staff), saving hundreds of millions
| overall.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| It's really frustrating that there's not a way to educate
| the public on simple concepts like this. You'd think the
| out-in-the-open development approach of SpaceX, for
| instance, would make it blatantly obvious how much money
| they're saving by permitting failure...yet the news
| continually spins their less-than-perfectly successful test
| launches as undesirable. And space spending is perhaps one
| of the least consequential areas of government where this
| failure of the herd to comprehend reality applies.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| The public are smarter than you give them credit for. For
| the most part space missions are contests between
| governments and those governed with science as a
| consolation price. If you are part of team A do you want
| to have to come up with reasoning on why you lost? No.
| Does anyone care if a billionaire's toy gets blown up?
| No. The obvious choice to eliminate all risk would be not
| to play, but that is not an option; the other is to delay
| and delay some more. Thus, SLS.
| smileson2 wrote:
| It's easy to imagine 3-4 years of projects failing and
| someone grandstanding about it, space exploration is a
| pointless endeavor to a lot of people
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > The public and decision makers react irrationally to any
| failure, putting funding for other missions and the entire
| program in jeopardy. NASA and ESA have to make some
| extremely suboptimal decisions to make sure that funding
| doesn't get catastrophically cut.
|
| Which, incidentally, is one of the key reasons SpaceX has
| had the success they have: they're set up to handle failure
| and avoid this politics. How many Starships have blown up?
| If Starship were a NASA program, how many explosions ago
| would it have been cancelled? And yet this approach to risk
| is pretty effective!
| mmooss wrote:
| Isn't that partly or largely due to Musk's influence?
| Like many powerful influencers, Musk can reliably rally
| supporters to even an unreality.
|
| Compare the responses to a failure by Boeing or SLS and
| to a failure by SpaceX.
|
| Also, SpaceX hasn't had a serious non-experimental
| failure yet (?). I'm sure their PR is preparing for that
| eventuality, but when non-fans are upset over a bad
| outcome and then learn about the risk tolerated, they
| will swing from admiring risk to condemning it. Imagine
| the Congressional committees.
|
| Even if SpaceX is super-conservative when flying humans
| (which we shouldn't assume - cultures tend to be
| consistent), if someone dies then all that risk-seeking
| behavior will be attacked.
|
| (To be clear, as long as SpaceX can manage risk in
| production - i.e., with high-value payloads such as
| people and NASA flagships - I think they and everyone
| else should use risk efficiently.)
| 15155 wrote:
| > Also, SpaceX hasn't had a serious non-experimental
| failure yet
|
| SpaceX had an explosive failure in 2016 with a commercial
| payload onboard.
| mmooss wrote:
| Thanks. How valuable was the payload?
| kens wrote:
| I was curious, so I looked up the budget. Development of Europa
| Clipper cost about $2.5 billion of which $1.1 billion was the
| spacecraft, $475M was payload, $200M was the launch vehicle
| (about $230M saved by not using SLS), $160M for ground systems,
| $60 M for testing. Formulation of Europa Clipper cost $1.2
| billion. Operating it will cost about $80M per year.
|
| Details on the Europa Clipper budget are at
| https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/nasa-fy-2024...
|
| (Edit: fixed billion/million typo)
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| > $200 billion was the launch vehicle
|
| Million I'd assume?
| frickinLasers wrote:
| > (about $230M saved by not using SLS)
|
| Since SLS launches are now upwards of $2B per launch by some
| estimates, how does this math work? Wikipedia also suggests
| $2 billion saved.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Europa_Cli.
| ..
| philistine wrote:
| I bet you it's what the project would have been charged by
| the SLS program, but SLS would have lost a billion by
| providing a launch.
| kens wrote:
| In the NASA budget, -$230M is the "change from base year
| estimate" for the launch vehicle. In other words, the
| launch vehicle ended up being less than half the price of
| the initial budget estimate. (This is unusual; almost
| everything goes up from the initial budget.) Originally,
| congress mandated that Europa Clipper use the SLS to
| launch. But after vibration problems turned up with SLS, it
| would take $1 billion to redesign the Clipper. They say the
| SLS would have cost $1 billion for the launch vehicle. So I
| think the way the math works out is that SLS rocket cost
| much more than originally budgeted ($800M more?) and it
| would have cost another $1 billion to redesign Clipper. So
| abandoning SLS saved $230 million compared to the original
| budget but saved $2 billion compared to what SLS would have
| ended up costing.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Building a ship containing delicate sensors that needs to get
| into space, arrive at the target, and beam back measurements on
| the first try with a very low tolerance for error is hard.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| On Earth, it's cost-efficient to build things with a reasonable
| "bathtub curve" failure rate because they can be repaired or
| (if a consumer product) replaced under warranty. Neither of
| these are an option in one-off space projects: everything has
| to be built to ~100% initial reliability, which makes
| everything much more expensive.
|
| In theory falling launch costs will eventually mean maybe we
| can make space science missions more disposable so a loss from
| random failure is no big deal, but we're not quite there yet.
| frinxor wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper#Launch_and_traj...
|
| really cool to see the trajectory:
|
| - earth mars gravity assists
|
| - complex trajectory around jupiter and its moons
| supplemental wrote:
| For a moment I though this is European space agency sending a
| rocket :'(
| mmooss wrote:
| I love JPL's straightforward bio:
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/jet-propulsion-laboratory-history/
|
| "JPL led the U.S. into space with Explorer 1, the first U.S.
| satellite, and joined NASA shortly after the agency formed in
| 1958. JPL spacecraft have flown to every planet in the solar
| system, the Sun, and into interstellar space in a quest to better
| understand the origins of the universe, and of life."
|
| Not many organizations can say that: _We 've flown to every
| planet in the solar system._ Wow. (And of course, they've done
| more than that.)
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