Bicay: The primary goal is to take this world-class expertise that we have in earth, space and life sciences and move it from a pure research-oriented mode to a more sustainable model where our scientists do basic research part of the time, and applied research the rest of the time — with that applied research often including participation in missions and programs. What we need to do here, quite frankly, is to alter the perception that Ames science has not been as relevant as it needs to be. In fact, there are some who characterize us as the “University of Ames.” We have to demonstrate that we have the expertise and the interest in contributing to NASA’s vision, and find substantive ways of engaging our scientists in strategically relevant and meaningful activities.

Under Peter Worden, the idea is to grab the agency and shake it into a new way of thinking. In a nutshell, it is to implement and execute a program of small satellites. It’s a demonstration that we can do good science and technology demonstrations for far less money than the agency might have spent in the past. We, the agency, have gotten into a world in which there are very few NASA centers that can build spacecraft and can manage flight programs. We have gotten ourselves into a world where there are very few aerospace companies and industries that are even able to bid on NASA projects. One of the consequences is that the price for doing any one thing is becoming prohibitively expensive. We’re not talking about a sole-source kind of world, but it is getting close. You don’t see the competition you see in a true, free-market economy.

What Ames and Dr. Worden want to do is hit the “reset” button and demonstrate that we can do “bang-bang science” for far less money than NASA as typically spent on these projects. A firm example of this is the LCROSS mission, and this is a roughly 80-million-dollar piggyback mission. Ames is leading this effort, and we will be hitching a ride on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launches in late 2008. We will have an innovative experiment where we crash — intentionally crash — a vehicle into the lunar surface, hopefully in a darkened lunar crater where there may, or may not, be solid lunar ice. Then we have an accompanying shepherding spacecraft that will fly through the resulting impact plume of material, which may reach up 100 km, and should provide definitive evidence to whether there is or is not water in the deep, darkened, shadowed craters near the lunar poles.

It’s a risky experiment, but with these low cost missions, the agency has to be willing to accept more risk, and that is something it has not done easily in the past. The bottom line is innovation: everything that NASA does, at least in space science, is a custom hot-rod. And we have seen very few economies of scale, and we would like to try to find a new way of doing business such that we could launch small spacecraft more frequently, perhaps every six months; maybe find some economies of scale, such as a common spacecraft bus, and find a way to drive down the cost of doing these missions. Much of the cost of these missions not only flows from the very few vendors, but from the heavy management oversight. If you demand a program to be 99.9% successful, then you must by definition build in extensive testing and extensive oversight — and those costs multiply. What we are trying to do is convince the agency and community to accept a slightly lower success rate — I don’t know what the number would be, maybe 90%, maybe 95% — in exchange for doing something that is many factors cheaper than it otherwise would be. I think the future of Ames is heavily wrapped up in Dr. Worden’s vision for creating a viable small satellite capability.

For more information, contact Dr. Bicay at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .