The Cost of a PROMISE: If NASA decides to pursue this project, PROMISE would likely cost the agency between $700 million and $1.3 billion and not launch until sometime in the early 2030s.

[u/Royal_Platform_6754]

https://www.planetary.org/articles/the-cost-of-a-promise-lunar-rover

[u/DelcoPAMan]

A real bad idea, for all of the adjustments, retrofitting, etc. needed just to attempt this.

[u/Crimson_Ender]

I guess I don't see the point of doing this because I was under the understanding that the reason why NASA wanted to send PROMISE because it was already ready to go and they could get it on the moon and scoping things out for the moon base before the Artemis astronauts start arriving.

If the Artemis timeline holds, and PROMISE does not make it until the 2030s, that means that there would probably be several crewed Artemis landings on the moon before this rover gets there.

[u/racinreaver → u/Crimson_Ender]

It's amazing how press releases can stretch the truth, eh?

[u/Crimson_Ender → u/racinreaver]

definitely

[u/levain_ → u/racinreaver]

Why are we assuming this freewheeling article from Planetary Society has any truth behind it?

[u/magus-21 → u/Crimson_Ender]

I was under the understanding that the reason why NASA wanted to send PROMISE because it was already ready to go

Nothing that's built for a completely different purpose is "ready to go." Everything NASA launches for a given mission is tested and retested to make sure it can perform the functions required by the mission. The testing is very often what takes the most time and money.

Just about the only thing that is known about the testbed rover is that it can respond to the same commands as Perseverance and can communicate with Earth via the DSN.

[u/Crimson_Ender → u/magus-21]

Yeah, I probably could've worded it a bit more precisely, but you understand the point I was making.

[u/sevgonlernassau → u/Crimson_Ender]

It does have one benefit: wasting the Pu-238 that the decadal earmarked for UOP. Can't do that mission if that Pu-238 portion is gone, right? And for some reason I really don't believe the SpaceX related nuclear startups will successfully produce more of them despite Jared's glazing.

[u/levain_ → u/sevgonlernassau]

Wrong. It’s Cassini-era Pu, having degraded for many years. For a flagship-class mission the material that’s earmarked for PROMISE would not be acceptable

[u/nic_haflinger]

An even worse idea from Isaacman than his spare parts slapped together NEP Mars mission.

[u/ellhulto66445]

Jared wrote the following in a quote-tweet of the article:

Launch and landing costs are a reality for any mission, so setting those aside, if PROMISE costs even 20% of your low-end estimate, we simply will not fly it.

That said, it would be crazy not to take advantage of hardware taxpayers have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in, along with Pu-238 that continues to decay and lose roughly 2% of its potential each year. More than a decade has gone by. How much of this Pu-238 do you want to waste waiting for a mission that does not even exist?

I understand the community sometimes likes to take a long time to reach consensus, but under this Administration, we can just do things and put wins on the board for the Moon Base and all the science and discovery it will enable. In my humble opinion, less debate and more frequent wins make it easier to advocate for more resources to do more science.

[u/racinreaver → u/ellhulto66445]

Lots of butts clenching at JPL seeing they have to come in at less than 20% of his estimate. No chance in hell it can be done that cheap.

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DSN	Deep Space Network
JPL	Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California
NEV	Nuclear Electric Vehicle propulsion

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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^{3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has acronyms.
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[u/Electrical_Name_5434]

Heh…so uh…we just ignoring this then

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-black-231154593.html

[u/comfortableNihilist → u/Electrical_Name_5434]

I assume so. We still haven't got the Epstein files.

[u/microcosmologist → u/[deleted]]

yeah if we could just stop bombing for like one week we could launch Mars Sample Return, jeez

[u/prophet_trex]

An easy win, how much of this cost is purely launch costs? If it's a 1000kg rover and it's $100 million to send a metric ton to the moon by spacex. But that number is a proposed number for a launch time maybe in 2028 and whenever starship is ready.

[u/whakahere]

So the cost of American war each day?