by Chris Peterson » Sat Dec 03, 2011 5:59 pm
JohnD wrote:Sorry, hip shooting at costs. NASA estimate $1.5 TRILLION per Shuttle launch over the life of the programme, but $500 MILLION at the end when all the non-recurring costs are paid.
Only $500 million!
Exactly. Simple shuttle missions cost about $500 million. Complex missions like those that serviced the HST cost about $1 billion.
The entire Phobos-Grunt mission funding- development and multiple year operational costs- is (or was) about $160 million. Using a shuttle mission to recover the spacecraft, or repurpose it for something like an asteroid mission, would be economic nonsense. And that's assuming it would even be feasible to do so with a spacecraft not designed to be serviced.
The reality is that when a spacecraft fails, it is almost always cheaper and smarter to just start over. BTW, this applies to the HST as well, which never should have been serviced, just replaced occasionally.
[quote="JohnD"]Sorry, hip shooting at costs. NASA estimate $1.5 TRILLION per Shuttle launch over the life of the programme, but $500 MILLION at the end when all the non-recurring costs are paid.
Only $500 million![/quote]
Exactly. Simple shuttle missions cost about $500 million. Complex missions like those that serviced the HST cost about $1 billion.
The entire Phobos-Grunt mission funding- development and multiple year operational costs- is (or was) about $160 million. Using a shuttle mission to recover the spacecraft, or repurpose it for something like an asteroid mission, would be economic nonsense. And that's assuming it would even be feasible to do so with a spacecraft not designed to be serviced.
The reality is that when a spacecraft fails, it is almost always cheaper and smarter to just start over. BTW, this applies to the HST as well, which never should have been serviced, just replaced occasionally.