Green Dragon; A commercial Uranus atmospheric probe delivery system; NASA SBIR 2014 proposal

24_Uranus_Orbiter_and_Probe

According to the above paper ,”The probe will enter using aerodynamic braking to slow from 22 km/s at entry interface” In our case we propose to slow the entire two Dragon capsule flight system with an inflatable aerodynamic decelerater attached to the Dragon TPS system.We need to model this with modified ADOPT-Vital mission design study.

Uranus Dragon probe and orbiter

One or both Dragon capsules perform a subsequent EDL some days or weeks after aerodynamic deceleration,the SpaceX Trunk remains as science and telecommunications orbiter.

issues and trade space, developement costs of a small fission reactor, mass production of balloon probes and zonds,we will need to replace SpaceX avionics for all deep space missions,we need to modal two spaceX Dragons docked to one another during launch and aerodynamic deceleration.Can the small fission reactor radiator dump heat into a pressurized capsule to warm the spacecraft?

Narrow-angle camera (NAC)
2. UV imaging spectrograph
3. Mid-IF thermal detector
4. Plasma Instrument #1
5. Plasma Instrument #2
6. USO
(Probe)
7. USO
8. Nephelometer
study the costs of producing 5 flight sets of each of the above instruments
one each for a Jupiter,Saturn,Uranus,Neptune mission plus flight spares.In the case of the probes,Green Dragon should be able to carry multiple probes. notionally we see three probes per flight so we would want to cost engineer 15 probes.
Next we would need to cost engineer 5 flight sets of the Decadal study small fission reactor(FPS) including R & D.Our original idea was to modal the FPS radiator inside a Dragon capsule pressure vessel with a HeXe atmosphere! The purpose to warm the spacecraft in the outer solar system.FPS radiater at 4 Meters length and 4.5 Meters circumference is too large to fit with in the Dragon pressure vessel.

A Small Fission Power System for NASA Planetary Science Missions NASA TM-2011-217099 – 1Dec11 25pp 20120000789_2012000894

Wide Angle Camera (WAC) Analogy to LORRI [JHU/APL] LORRI (New Horizons)
Visible/Near-IR Mapping Spectrometer
NICM III System-Level Parametric Model–Optical
RALPH (New Horizons)
Magnetometer Analogy [NICM III, JHU/APL] MESSENGER MAG
Magnetometer Boom Vendor prices [MESSENGER, RBSP cost
data]
Cassini boom
cost engineer 5 flight sets each of the above instruments.

This concept needs a SEP stage,this stage could be housed in an additional Dragon trunk and would be powered by the FPS.Pushing the mass of a two capsule flight system calls for an asteroid retrieval sized SEP stage.

BUSINESS CASE
we aim to please the decadal survey and the customer NASA,we hope to win a finalist study Grant from a Discovery AO, if not selected we would attempt to fly a commercial data sales business model.
We recover our costs by selling science data to NASA as an anchor tenant another space agency’s and by selling space on the spacecraft as a science “hosted payload”

The mariner mark-III Dragon series