Which is Better: Putting Many Eggs into Fewer Baskets or Fewer Eggs into Many Baskets? An Investigation into NASA's Planetary Science RD Resource Allocation

摘要

Effective space R&D portfolio management is becoming an increasingly complex issue. Understanding the implications of today's R&D decisions for the effectiveness of future space missions is an area that remains largely unexplored. Choosing one option at the expense of others will have both obvious and subtle impacts on overall system design. These decision results can also be felt within the system as well as across related systems. One of the major questions for decision makers in a technical organization is how to best allocate investments to various types and maturities of technologies. One needs to consider the range of possibilities as well as understand the potential tradeoffs between focusing investment on a small number of high-value technology types and achieving a critical mass of investment across a larger number of important technology advances. This paper overviews the history of operational scientific instrument development as well as the near and medium term projections of scientific instrument development in NASA's planetary science arena. For convenience in organizing and communicating general findings, a taxonomy of instrument capabilities is created and trends in technology evolution over time are demonstrated. Based on this, initial findings are identified and explored. An analysis is performed comparing the space of technologies actually under consideration in mission concepts with the significantly larger space of potential technologies that can be considered. This will help lead to insights into potentially greater scientific utility at a portfolio level as well as showing which developmental instruments may be more or less likely to actually become operational, regardless of scientific value. From this we demonstrate potential impacts of various investment allocation alternatives. Pros and cons of investing resources into multiple smaller pathways versus fewer larger pathways are explored.