/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12011319
On top of the probes and the astronaut training, NASA should work like NOAA or the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute where they have a small fleet of manned modular reusable spacecraft based on commercial designs that get reconfigured on the fly for specific missions.

Something like a NASA-owned Starship that's set up as a spartan space laboratory where one year it goes to the moon with one set of scientific payloads and instruments for a landing and a 3-month geological survey, and the next year it loads up with a completely different set of payloads and instruments and flies an intercept mission to a near-earth asteroid, and a few months after that it gets its payloads and instruments swapped out again and flies back to the moon for a 2-month stay in low polar orbit using powerful ground-penetrating radar on some joint mapping mission tied to a bunch of folks at Caltech and MIT's postdocs, and then on to the next mission, etc etc etc.