re mothership for flybys and cutting costs in a recent article nsmca aurora alaska edu writes okay we have figure out that a mission specifically to pluto is to large and to expensive i d hardly call the current pluto fast flyby proposal too large if the new technology insertion currently taking place succeeds the s c mass will drop to kg or too expensive million fy for two s c especially when compared to other nasa planetary missions basically what i mean is design a mother ship that has piggy backed probes for different missions namely different planets each probe would be tied in with the mother ship or earth as the case may be this is good when and if we go for mars the mars mission can act as either mother ship or relay point for the probes this proposal would work only if your various targets are relaively nearby and the require minimal delta v from the mother ship a mission to the main belt might be one possibility for such a mission i recall a paper being presented at an aiaa deisgn conference in irvine in february where such a proposed spacecraft was designed by some grad students at ut austin i think four mini spacecraft would detatch from the main s c each visiting a seperate asteroid and then returning to the main s c after analysis the main s c would then be targeted for the most interesting object for further study now if i could only find that paper jeff foust days historical analogy is the last refuge senior planetary science caltech of people who can t grasp the current jafoust cco caltech edu situation from red mars by jeff scn jpl nasa gov kim stanley robinson
