Beware the Rings of Pluto

You don't really get much improvement in per-unit cost by building 10 of something vs 2. The biggest factor in the cost even with just the first couple isn't the engineering but the testing and qualification. Most of that has to be repeated for every unit you build until you are creating enough to have confidence in the past performance and to fall back to statistical testing, or at least are building enough for automating that work to be economical. But you would need to be creating several dozen of them for that to kick in. Furthermore, construction is more expensive that you are allowing for at those low quantities since it's all is done by hand, by highly skilled labor. That won't drop by much until you get into mass-manufacturing quantities, hundreds at least.

So you would get minor savings, and at the loss of a huge amount of science. There is a reason that each of these probes is wildly different, and that is because the have wildly varying requirements. There is no one-size fits all suite of sensors. They will want different spectral ranges, different optics setups (detailed, narrow FOV vs wide coverage), different transmitter requirements (Horizon has much farther to transmit than MRO), all of which drives different battery requirements.

Finally, the point of science is to keep learning; to keep pushing things forward. You do that by sending probes with improved and/or different capabilities, not just more of the same. Sure we could have sent 3 more MERs (Spirit/Opportunity) for the cost of Curiosity, but we wouldn't have learned as much as Curiosity will be able to tell us.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/vvM5GkburEA/beware-the-rings-of-pluto

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