"I'll buy 10 of those"—NASA science chief yearns for mass-produced satellites

A future with numerous robotic probes spread throughout the Solar System sounds thrilling to space scientists and space enthusiasts, but you can’t get there with flat budgets and billion-dollar missions that take a decade to get off the ground. Many of NASA’s robotic science missions use purpose-built satellites and instruments, usually manufactured by large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, university labs, or NASA itself. Unlike SpaceX’s hangars full of reusable rockets, there’s no building with cameras, spectrometers, telescopes, and spacecraft buses—the core chassis of a satellite platform—lying around waiting to launch. “Instead of having a bespoke bus that does absolutely everything, and makes the tea and brings you toast, what can you do with an off-the-shelf bus?” Fox told Ars. “And maybe you have to change a few things. Maybe you fly fewer instruments, but maybe you fly three [spacecraft] together. How do we really pick up the pace? Because it is difficult when you have long gaps between the missions. It’s certainly not what anyone wants to see.” One way to make this future real is with mass-produced, high-power satellites. Small CubeSats, just the size of a suitcase, are great for missions close to home, but they won’t cut it for missions to more distant destinations, such as another planet or a unique orbit far from Earth. NASA is making use of other ways to collect scientific data in space, such as placing instruments on the International Space Station or on commercial communications satellites. But those solutions won’t work if you want to travel to another world. Sometimes it just costs a lot of money to do the near-impossible. “For $100 million, you can’t buy a bus from somewhere and put four instruments on it and send it to flight to Enceladus to look under the ice there,” Fox said. “No, that’s a big, ambitious mission. We want to fly an interstellar-type probe. As the Voyagers are getting older, we want to study interstellar space. These things are hard, and they’re tough, and it will take a lot of effort to do that. We also talked about actually flying a mission to Uranus.” But what about spacecraft flying on more well-trodden paths to the Moon, Mars, Venus, or the asteroid belt? “What can we do with these commercial off-the-shelf buses? I would love to walk in and say, ‘I’ll buy 10 of those,’” Fox said. NASA is looking at “block buys” for the next series of commercial missions to the Moon. These privately owned landers and orbiters, part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, carry NASA-owned payloads. They are precursors for future human exploration. After the Moon, Mars is the next destination that could use the CLPS model. “Mars is sort of an obvious next one,” Fox said. “Why can’t I do that with a mission going somewhere else, and say, ‘Hey, who wants to take these instruments here?’ I’m actually really excited about the possibilities that the commercial sector open up to us.” “How in the hell do I get more science into space? That is my goal,” Fox said. NASA could set up future competitions to review proposals and select winners more quickly. In the past, NASA has selected a handful of concepts for study contracts, then chosen one or two proposals to proceed into development. For future competitions, NASA might go straight to a final selection. The space agency is also looking at rebalancing its science portfolio to spend less money on operating science missions, many of which have been in space for decades, to free up funding for new development. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars operating legacy missions, and we’ve wanted for a while to look at what could AI give us?” Fox said. “How can you combine operations for a couple of missions, and how do we do it for less? I don’t want to turn them off because they’re still doing great science, but we have to find a way to operate them for less.” “There was a decision made to select two Discovery missions together, and that does put stress on a portfolio when you have two large missions together,” Fox said. “Dragonfly still chugging along … [It’s] moving along very well towards a launch in 2028. Obviously, that had some challenges, got delayed several times, but it seems to be going at a good pace.” Next year, NASA aims to launch NEO Surveyor, a telescope specially designed to detect and track asteroids that might threaten Earth. It is not part of NASA’s Discovery or New Frontiers programs. “We have then DAVINCI sort of waiting, and then VERITAS, and we still have Europa Clipper [on the way to Jupiter]. That is a pretty challenging mission to operate,” Fox said. “We’ve got the two rovers down on the surface of Mars. So there are some pretty big endeavors in planetary, and I think when we can get some of these launched, it will open up the [funding] wedge that we need to open up to be able to [do more missions]. “Unpopular though it may be, it is sometimes better to wait and put out the call [for proposals] when you really know that you have secure funding,” Fox said. “It’s just we’ve got a lot of stuff in planetary that needs to be launched. So putting focus on keeping Dragonfly on track for that 2028 launch, keeping NEO Surveyor on track for the 2027 launch, that will really help. And then looking at ways to actually pull in DAVINCI and launch it earlier than we planned. The earlier we launch it, the quicker I open up a wedge for another mission.”