The New Millennium Program: Positioning NASA for ambitious space and earth science missions for the 21st century

Abstract

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has established the New Millennium Program (NMP) to enable space and Earth science missions to be carried out far more cost‐effectively in the 21st century than they are today. NMP will develop and flight validate the revolutionary technologies that will be needed to carry out NASA’s 21st‐century missions, and will also demonstrate methods to drastically reduce mission costs. Advances in technology will enable the reduction of spacecraft and instrument size, an increase in autonomy and reduction of operations costs, and innovation in measurement techniques and mission architectures: all needed for the high‐return missions of the future. Because the design space of the technology‐validation flights exceeds the available money and scheduling resources, the approach will be to first exhaustively explore mission design space, and then evaluate missions for such factors as technological value, scientific capability, cost, and level of public interest. The oversubscribed mission set can then be reduced to a maximum‐value set for implementation. Anticipated societal benefits from NMP include stimulated development of advanced technologies and creation of new U.S. industry to meet the demand for capable microspacecraft.