NASA History: Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight - The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission (NASA SP-2005-4536)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), World Spaceflight News, Howard E. McCurdy
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Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight - The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
Howard E. McCurdy
The NASA History Series
Monographs in Aerospace History Number 36 - NASA SP-2005-4536
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Office of External Relations History Division Washington, DC * 2005
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On a spring day in 1996, at their research center in the Maryland countryside, representatives from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) presented Administrator Daniel S. Goldin of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with a check for $3.6 million.1 Two and a half years earlier, APL officials had agreed to develop a spacecraft capable of conducting an asteroid rendezvous and to do so for slightly more than $122 million. This was a remarkably low sum for a spacecraft due to conduct a planetary-class mission. By contrast, the Mars Observer spacecraft launched in 1992 for an orbital rendezvous with the red planet had cost $479 million to develop, while the upcoming Cassini mission to Saturn required a spacecraft whose total cost was approaching $1.4 billion. In an Agency accustomed to cost overruns on major missions, the promise to build a planetary-class spacecraft for about $100 million seemed excessively optimistic.
As a test of the feasibility of their "faster, better, cheaper" initiative, NASA officials had begun funding the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission in late 1993. They had assigned the mission to the Applied Physics Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and development division of Johns Hopkins University located on a 365-acre campus between Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC. Scientists and engineers from the laboratory's Space Department ran the mission. The Space Department at APL had come into being in 1959 to build navigation satellites for the United States Navy. Although increasingly involved in NASA work, APL scientists and engineers had never managed a major planetary mission. That responsibility commonly fell to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a NASA Field Center in Pasadena, California, operated by the California Institute of Technology.
Officials at the Applied Physics Laboratory spent 27 months designing, constructing, and testing their 468-kilogram (1,032-pound) NEAR spacecraft. On 17 February 1996, they launched the spacecraft from the U.S. Air Force Cape Canaveral launch station in Florida. The development program was over, the spacecraft launched and gone. APL officials totaled the money spent on design, testing, flight systems, scientific instruments, prelaunch operations, and project management. To the delight of mission advocates, the cost of developing the NEAR spacecraft totaled $3.6 million less than the original estimate. Someone suggested that the project leaders present an oversized, ceremonial check to NASA for the money they had saved. Goldin happily accepted it that spring.
Ten months later, on 4 December 1996, another Delta 2 model 7925 rocket departed from the Canaveral launch station. It too carried a low-cost spacecraft, commissioned by NASA executives but, in this case, built by workers at JPL. This spacecraft was bound for the planet Mars. Called Mars Pathfinder, the second spacecraft carried in its arms a small, 22-pound microrover named Sojourner.
The NEAR and Pathfinder missions were the most visible and highly publicized products of NASA's early efforts to demonstrate the feasibility of low-cost spaceflight. Both missions were hugely successful. The Pathfinder robot landed on Mars in the summer of 1997. NEAR chased the asteroid Eros around the solar system for four years, finally orbiting the 21-mile-long object in February 2000. After circling Eros for one year, the renamed NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on the asteroid's surface in February 2001, the first such landing in the history of spaceflight.
Much has been written about the management of the Pathfinder mission, including books by team leaders Brian Muirhead and Donna Shirley.2 Reports on the NEAR spacecraft, the asteroid rendezvous, and science results are likewise extensive, including a book entitled Asteroid Rendezvous: NEAR Shoemaker's Adventures at Eros that features illustrations and articles by many of the principal participants.3 Reports on the management of the NEAR mission are neither as extensive nor as accessible. This monograph tells the story of the NEAR mission from the point of view of the management challenges involved in conducting low-cost missions while daily confronting the possibility of defeat.
The history that follows is divided into four sections. The first section recounts the origins of the expedition and the struggle to get the mission funded and approved. It explains how a small group of people came to believe that an asteroid rendezvous could be conducted as a low-cost mission, a revolutionary proposition at the time. Section two concentrates on the methods employed to translate the low-cost philosophy into a robotic spacecraft that actually worked. Attention is given to the team-building techniques that allowed the people organizing the mission to simultaneously restrain cost, meet the launch schedule, and reduce risk. In section three, the management challenges involved in flying the NEAR spacecraft over the five-year flight regime are described. The difficulties were substantial, involving the guidance of a low-cost robotic spacecraft and the coordination of mission teams at three different locations. On the first rendezvous attempt with Eros, the little spacecraft missed its target, thus requiring another trip around the solar system and significant changes in organizational protocols. Finally, section four assesses the "faster, better, cheaper"4 initiative and the NEAR mission's contribution to it.
The scientific returns from the first sustained examination of a near-Earth asteroid were impressive. Equal to them in importance were the management lessons learned. For many decades, visionaries have predicted a future of cheap and easy spaceflight by which means humans and their machines would spread into the solar system. The NEAR mission team undertook one of the pioneering efforts in that regard, producing a spacecraft that tested not only scientific theories concerning the formation of the solar system, but also management theories on the reduction of cost.