NASA Boss Balks At Billion-Dollar Estimate For Recycled Moon Rover
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Turning two Mars testbeds into one lunar explorer may prove anything but cheap:
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has stated "we simply will not fly it" if claims about the costs of the repurposed Mars rover engineering model prove anywhere near accurate.
Isaacman was responding to the Planetary Society's chief of space policy, Casey Dreier, who had run the numbers on his plan to send a robot to the Moon, built from parts of engineering models of the successful Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity.
Dreier estimated that the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration (PROMISE) mission, as discussed by Isaacman in a June presentation,would cost between $723 million and $1.33 billion.
Dreier's figures include a low-end launch and landing cost of $234 million and a high-end estimate of $320 million.
PROMISE is intended to put a rover on the Moon for a fraction of the usual cost. There are engineering testbeds for both Perseverance and Curiosity, dubbed OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars) and MAGGIE (Mars Automated Giant Gizmo for Integrated Engineering) respectively.
While not 100 percent identical to what was sent to Mars, the pair are designed to be close enough to allow engineers to perform activities such as plotting drives on simulated Martian terrain and seeing how the hardware will react to commands sent from Earth.
NASA bosses looked at the engineering models, considered ways to score easy "wins," as Isaacman put it, and came up with an idea.
Engineering models are common enough in spaceflight. A Development Test Model (DTM) of Voyager can be found hanging in the Exploring the Planets gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The DTM's bus was liberated in 1987 for developing NASA's Magellan Venus spacecraft. The Register also paid a visit to a test model of the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter on a 2022 visit to the agency's Darmstadt site, which looked more like an explosion of wiring than a simulacrum of a spacecraft.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.