NASA's Europa Clipper Launch

Cost of the Europa Clipper program is around $4-5 billion. Can anyone in the industry shed some light on why these programs are so expensive?

I worked on one component of the spacecraft which was a derivative of something we've built may times before. However, the test program was entirely unique to Europa Clipper, and most of the cost was in this bespoke testing. The use of a "heritage" component served mostly to lower risk; it did not save much cost overall.

And can introduce unusual failure cases for these bespoke missions. Mars Observer was lost in flight to Mars three decades ago, probably because of the inappropriate reuse of a satellite rocket engine. (1) The space environment out around Jupiter is really quite different from the environment that the JWST is facing around E-S L2 or what the Parker Solar Probe is facing right near the Sun. Even if the component is spec'd to handle the environment, you need to have actual educated humans (read: expensive labor) determine what those conditions will be, and then verify that the part will meet it, and that's where the money goes- to pay all of those humans.

If you built even 15 Europa Clippers the cost per-item would come down enormously (because all of those people's work could be re-used), but since the 1970's NASA has not had the budget for multiple probes per missions. So every mission is bespoke, and has to be done again completely from scratch.

1: The engine was normally used for circularizing the orbit of a geosynch comm satellite, so within a few hours of flight. For doing a Mars Insertion burn it needed to sit fueled for months in outer space, which was not appropriately tested, and probably the fuel tank exploded in flight because of that.

> So every mission is bespoke, and has to be done again completely from scratch.

Is there room here for making things more reusable? For example, instead of creating one big satellite with tens of instruments, how about they create 10 satellites with one instrument each? or would that still be too bespoke to lower the cost per item?

While we now live in an era of abundant rocket launches, it used to cost far more to launch with very few launches per year.

The whole strategies of exploration haven’t shifted yet to this new paradigm. Hopefully NASA starts making smaller probes and launching them far more often.

Europa Clipper is literally the largest thing ever launched to the outer planets (so big that Falcon Heavy can't be reused for this mission, they have to throw it all away in order to get every last jot of performance out of the rocket- so this is not an "abundant rocket launches" situation- this is a fully expendable rocket just like an Atlas V). And the size is not for fun, but because going close to Europa (the entire point of the mission) means going through the second strongest set of EM and radiation belts in our solar system. Even with this size- meaning it can have a lot more shielding than normal- the probe can only survive a few months of the radiation from Jupiter's van Allen belts. The plan is to break that few months of exposure up over about four years of calendar time, by having it do highly elliptical orbits so it stores a lot of data during a close flyby of Europa and then transmits that all back to Earth while it is far outside of Jupiter's radiation storm, then it can head back down and collect more data. And that lengthy transmission time is because it is sending information from so far away- and has so little juice that the effective bandwidth is tiny.

It is possible for a swarm of small satellites to fill niches in space exploration. Closely studying Europa isn't really one of them with today's technology.