A fascinating post by Anthony Kendall cites the reasons why Terrestrial Planet Finder is such an important mission and goes on to call for NASA’s being broken into separate entities, to make missions like this more likely to launch. From the Anthonares weblog:
Gradually, constructing, launching, and operating missions in Earth orbits or in Lagrange points should be taken over by consortia similar to those that operate ground-based facilities today. As commercial satellite companies have demonstrated, they are more than capable of managing their own facilities. NASA’s deep space expertise will necessitate the existence of an unmanned space probe agency for several decades at least, and perhaps indefinitely as we look to explore the stars. The TPF missions could be the first in step in this process. If the scientific community wants them badly enough, they have the lobbying ability (as demonstrated with Hubble and New Horizons) to get Congress to fund them. Since private consortia will not have billions extra to absorb cost overruns, TPF will be constructed and launched quickly and more efficiently than within the stifling NASA bureaucracy.
The title says it all: “Terrestrial Planet Finder: The Most Important Mission NASA Should Not Fund.” It’s an interesting take on one way to get around the bureaucratic and political squeeze that has produced a budget with 17 more Shuttle flights while cutting significant science programs like TPF and the Space Interferometry Mission. Be sure to read this, and ponder, too, whether some ideas now emerging from our universities — I am thinking in particular of Webster Cash’s New Worlds Imager — might not offer substantial benefits over the existing design projections at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory TPF site.
I’m glad you liked my entry! Also, Jeff Foust wrote about the TPF and the Europa Orbiter over at Space Politics at nearly the same time I wrote my entry this afternoon.
Good point about the design improvements issue. If control of the TPF mission and its funding were given to a smaller consortium, perhaps increased flexibility in mission design would result.
I hope to have more about New Worlds Imager up soon. The key is to get significant output from outside the usual channels, which is where New Worlds Imager came from in the first place — it began as a set of studies done for NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts. And I don’t want to sound completely down on NASA; I have to give the agency credit for setting up NIAC specifically as a way of drawing in interesting work from outside the agency. But getting good ideas from the design stage into flight hardware is a huge leap, one we’ll have much more to say about in coming weeks.