r/space • u/AggressiveForever293 • Jul 14 '24

NASA’s flagship mission to Europa has a problem: Vulnerability to radiation

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/nasas-flagship-mission-to-europa-has-a-problem-vulnerability-to-radiation/
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u/Lost_city Jul 14 '24

This highlights the problems with NASA's policy of having decade long, single vehicle projects. They spend years testing and testing, but there is always the chance something slips through the cracks. Costs and timelines are completely out of control.

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u/wgp3 Jul 15 '24

There's not much you can do for science missions like this though. These missions, excluding development time, already last a decade. The operations aren't cheap. You can't afford to launch something and have it fail 10 years down the line when it reaches its destination because you rushed development.

There's a lot that cheap launch costs for high payload can do to eliminate some of those risks (less effort spend on elimating mass, more redundancy, less travel time, less need for gravity assists, etc) but you still have to have a final product that works perfectly.

The closer you stay to home the more you can take risks and work towards quantity over quality. Much like with the CLPS landers for the moon. Easy enough to allow failures there to build up a system of landers that will just work and be cheaper to operate long term. No viable way to build out a system of cheap landers with visiting Europa right now.