Discovery Mission cost cap

Anyone know why the cost cap for the discovery missions have grown so much?
When the program was first announced the cost cap was $250m - the recent
2006 announcement of opportunity has the cap at $425m. Why?
Why can't they keep the cap at $250m? Surely decent missions can still be
done for that value. And infation hasn't double prices for anything else
over that period. Surely we could do 2 missions for $425m.

Nathan

Compare that to Lunar Prospector, which was a Discovery mission that, I
believe, was way under the cost cap.

I believe launch costs are one reason for the higher cap. The number
of commercial launches on the Delta and Atlas launchers has gone down
since the 1990's when the Discovery program was started. There are
fewer telecommunications launches since the Internet bust, for example.
There are also non-US launchers commercial satellites can use. The
costs of the EELV launchers are being spread over fewer launches than
planned, so the price per launch is higher. The EELV business
situation is pretty bad and seems to be heading for worse.

Another reason is that, following the failure of 2 Mars probes, more
efforts are supposed to be made to make sure other missions, including
Discovery missions, are successful. That costs money.

Eventually you might get to the point where the easier missions have
already been done, but I don't think that's the case yet.

Plus, there has indeed been inflation since the initial Discovery
missions, including employee benefit costs and so on.

There are probably other reasons that I'm not thinking of at the
moment. I can think of a few cynical ones.

What can be done to allow good Discovery missions to be done for lower
cost per mission? Some possibilities are to fly lots of missions that
use the launchers and spacecraft technologies used by Discovery
missions to lower the average cost (some costs exist whether there are
2 or 200 missions) and get better at flying missions, hope someone like
SpaceX develops cheaper launch or mission operations/technologies (or
encourage this to happen 1 way or another), fly riskier missions and
accept a higher failure rate, do missions that are similar to each
other so common systems can be used, share the costs (and benefits)
with other organizations (like an ESA + NASA mission), or give
incentives for businesses to fly more commercial space missions (again
to lower average mission cost).

red

red_nodak wrote:
Compare that to Lunar Prospector, which was a Discovery mission that, I
believe, was way under the cost cap.

I believe launch costs are one reason for the higher cap. The number
of commercial launches on the Delta and Atlas launchers has gone down
since the 1990's when the Discovery program was started. There are
fewer telecommunications launches since the Internet bust, for example.
There are also non-US launchers commercial satellites can use. The
costs of the EELV launchers are being spread over fewer launches than
planned, so the price per launch is higher. The EELV business
situation is pretty bad and seems to be heading for worse.

A (probably minor) factor, also affecting the Explorer programs,
wasthe switchover within NASA to full-cost accounting a few years ago.
This means that such "support" issues as Deep-Space Network usage
are now costs directly charged to the mission budget rather than
being absorbed within the overall NASA budget. The switch was supposed
to be revenue-neutral, but there was some quick dancing when it
happened. This could add some millions to a long mission.

Bill Keel

In article ,
Blurrt wrote:
Anyone know why the cost cap for the discovery missions have grown so much?
When the program was first announced the cost cap was $250m...

No, in fact it was originally $150M, in 1992 dollars.

One problem, I think, is that there's been upward pressure on the cap. At
the beginning of the Discovery program, under the evil Dan Goldin :-),
NASA made a point of wanting maximum results per dollar, not just the best
results possible under the cap. In other words, a mission that came in at
$100M had a better chance than one estimated at $149.9M, to discourage
shaving proposals down to just barely fit. (In fact, the first round of
28 proposals were *all* under $100M, and the winner, Lunar Prospector, was
$59M. [All in 1992 dollars.])

Alas, my impression is that this has gradually been forgotten, and now
it's routine for all the proposals to come in right at the top. Which
makes people complain that if the cap had only been a little higher, they
could have done much more...
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article .com,
red_nodak wrote:
What can be done to allow good Discovery missions to be done for lower
cost per mission? Some possibilities are to fly lots of missions that
use the launchers and spacecraft technologies used by Discovery
missions to lower the average cost (some costs exist whether there are
2 or 200 missions) and get better at flying missions...

This is difficult, when each mission is awarded to a new team. The
competitive selection of Discovery missions has its points, but continuity
of personnel and engineering is not one of them.

In fact, that is generally something NASA has never been good at. Worse,
they don't even realize it's a problem: in reading several of the
post-MCO/MPL reports on "what's wrong and what we can do about it", they
were full of suggestions, but one that I found conspicuously absent was
"keep winning teams together and give them more missions".

(One factor that helped cause the MCO/MPL mess was that the unorthodox and
highly successful Mars Pathfinder team was broken up immediately
afterward. MCO and MPL were much more "business as usual" projects for
JPL, and with the tight schedule and budget, that just didn't work.)
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

No, in fact it was originally $150M, in 1992 dollars.

That didn't include launch costs, and the more recent figures do (I
think).

NASA made a point of wanting maximum results per dollar, not just the
best results possible under the cap. In other words, a mission that
came in at $100M had a better chance than one estimated at $149.9M, to
discourage shaving proposals down to just barely fit. (In fact, the
first round of 28 proposals were *all* under $100M, and the winner,
Lunar Prospector, was $59M. [All in 1992 dollars.])

It isn't clear that the cultural shift to adapt to this concept ever
really happened. At the first Discovery Lessons Learned session
(after Lunar Prospector and friends were selected) I remember people
agitating for different size categories ($0-50M, $50-100M, and
$100-150M, or whatever).

Perhaps there is a good reason for this, such as it being easier to
measure "proposal A gives better science than proposal B" versus
"proposal A gives 1.36 times as much science as proposal B". But
maybe it was a good idea which never fully got off the ground.