Oops. $400M for GRAIL. If it were $400B you might have a better point.

The GRAIL mission costs ~$400B. The NASA budget is ~$17B/year.

If you could fix the economy/budget problems with that amount of money in a politically viable way, GO TELL SOMEONE! Seriously... thats chump change in terms of the federal budget.

My renters insurance and at least specifies that it covers damage from 'aircraft and spacecraft'.

So... possibly yes?

I'm not sure I follow. While NASA is certainly having issues, none of the other programs are particularly stronger.

Russia: Riding the coat-tails of good design decisions many years ago (not that there's anything wrong with that, I wish we had a Soyuz-like design). Soyuz is simple and reliable and they can just keep on flying them without significant development costs. However, as indicated by their recent Mars probe their new development efforts have unfortunately decayed -- GRUNT suffered from not enough money to support decent redundancy and contingency planning.

Chinese: New and developing, and building on Soviet technology. I hope their efforts will be strong and civil-focused, even after the geo-political advantages fade, but in anything but currently being able to reproduce Soviet results with plenty of money, there's nothing I'm too worried about.

Europeans: Here's where you lost me. If your criteria was 'currently being able to fly people' then I could understand (but disagree), but the ESA is essentially a peer to the science mission directorate at NASA, with no manned capability. Considering EU budgets are even more problematic than the US budget I wouldn't say that their taking the lead, though I hope they remain valuable partners.

Personally, I'm tired of all the negativity about the NASA right now. Its been a rough few years, with no one in charge having enough sense to put NASA's manned program on a sustainable course. Now though, even with this SLS nonsense, we're finally on a path to develop robust access capabilities with multiple capsules on multiple launch vehicles. The unmanned programs are shining brightly still, with 3 launches, a comet flyby, the first vehicle in orbit of an asteroid, and the first spacecraft arriving at Mercury this year. We've continued to find more and stronger evidence of water on Mars, and have found ever-more Earth-like exo-planets. Not too shabby for one year.

Is anyone arguing with that? I'm a commercial space proponent and I work on NASA-funded planetary science missions.

The commercial space community states explicitly that NASA should be performing the "Lewis and Clark" job -- in fact thats the exact phrase we use. However, rides to orbit are no longer cutting edge technology, and have a proven opportunity for profit, and this is why we call for the government to stop insisting on its own launchers and use commercially available ones wherever possible, and to foster a market where it is possible to form one.

In planetary science we actively support this model, since Juno, MSL and GRAIL (the three recently launched missions) all launched on commercially purchased launch vehicles (though ULA is a bit of a monopoly so its not the healthiest commercial market).

Its not a replacement for all rockets. Its a replacement for giant rockets that are required to get huge payloads with lots of fuel to space.

The Apollo capsule could have launched easily on many of our current launch vehicles (it was tested on the Saturn I). It was the fuel required to inject towards the moon that required the huge Saturn V.

You're not trying to refuel the launch vehicle, you're trying to refuel the payload. It could be an injection stage for an interplanetary probe, the stationkeeping propellant for a satellite, or the fuel required to take an Apollo-style capsule to the moon.

So you'll need re-designed payloads, but not redesigned launch vehicles. The idea is that this reduces the need for a $50B monster like SLS by allowing larger missions with our current stable of launchers.

What do you suggest as an alternative CMS/Blogging system. I've recently taken over the web presence for a non-profit, and we are currently wordpress-based, though I'm in the process of completely revamping the site.

So far I really have come to like it, despite the fact that its PHP-based. Its easy enough to customize, once you buy-in to their design patterns, and it allows me to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get the site ready, while leaving the press and content writers perfectly capable of doing their jobs without needing/bothering me. Its easy to install and has lots of available plugins. And it makes it easy to use primarily as a CMS with the blog-like component active but in the background. Once I got past my own NIH symptom of wanting to build a custom framework, its treated me quite well.

Of course I am only an amateur, so I guess I may be part of the 'ignorant' market its intended for.

Its a technology demonstration for hardware that will eventually make deep space navigation better.

This is being run out of the JPL navigation section and is intended to improve long-term capabilities with a small investment.

On a Mac you can hit Command+Space to open Spotlight and then type the name of the program you want and achieve the same thing.

Just to keep you from going crazy next time.

Thats how its supposed to work. Governments should be doing the things private industry and individuals can't -- in this case development of technologies that have the potential to benefit society as a whole that are expensive enough and uncertain enough to never make a valid business plan or hobby project.

Then, those developments should be fed back to the citizens (and the companies they form), so that when its possible for the private entities to take advantage of it, they can. I work for NASA, and personally I'd much rather SpaceX/Boeing/Lockheed/Orbital build launch vehicles and let us worry about high-risk tech development and exploration.

Well, to be fair, a satellite in an extremely low Earth orbit with significant drag throughout its entire orbit is probably the most difficult place for us to track a live satellite.

The atmosphere is unpredictable, so its constantly rephasing the orbit in ways you can't predict, and when its that low, a ground station has a very brief time to get acquisition, get some data, and send it to the controllers for orbit determination. Compare to a deep space vehicle (say Juno instead of an alien spaceship), where even if you're uncertain by 100s of km you're still within the beam-width of a DSN tracking station, and you only need three stations around the globe to track it at any point in time. Plus the orbital dynamics are known well enough that you should be able to find it again 6 months or a year later pretty easily even if you lose all tracking data from now till then.

That is unless you're worrying about Webb and its partner money sponge SLS soaking up funds from other programs.

Personally, my interests are in seeing CCDEV/COTS, tech development, and planetary science advance. Sadly, unless things (I'll give management the benefit of the doubt and just leave it at luck) improves drastically I can't help but worry as costs keep going up and launch keeps getting delayed.

I think scientific interest would be more along the lines of using it more like GRACE, tracking climatic changes associated with carbon and water ice moving around. Additionally, you couldn't get data from as close to the surface, since you've got to stay out of the atmosphere, just like you do on Earth, making it harder to get 'crust to core' data.

The other problem is that flying these things in formation is *hard*, and around Mars it would be even harder. You depend on tracking data to and from Earth, in addition to the spacecraft-to-spacecraft range, and thats harder to do since its further away. Maintaining data to Earth on a higher-gain antenna while maintaining orbiter point would be difficult, since the pointing constraints are not guaranteed to get along. Plus trying to get them into synchronized orbits is hard enough around the Moon, so Mars sounds potentially nightmarish -- of course, for that you might just have to put them on a common bus and separate them after Mars entry. Additionally, you'd need a bigger motor than GRAIL/GRACE have, in order to achieve Mars orbit.

Given the new development required -- new antennae, figuring out the pointing, a common bus with its own attitude control system and thrusters, and a larger launch vehicle, my WAG for the cost is probably around $800M (compared to ~$495M for GRAIL). Definitely doable under a New Frontiers program. Plus, my experience is with GRAIL and Mars orbiters, so I'd be employed for quite a while and thus like the idea.

Technically, everything is done UTC, and the insertion burn for GRAIL-A is around 22:00 UTC on 31-Dec-2011, and GRAIL-B is after that.

Of course, the people operating it are stationed in Pacific and Mountain time zones (JPL/DSN and Lockheed Martin in Denver), and that places the maneuvers mid-afternoon on those days.