Welcome to "Poor Man's Guide to Deep Space Missions" – our detailed roadmap for space exploration on a shoestring budget. If you’ve ever gazed up at the stars and wondered what it would take to send a spacecraft out there, this guide is for you. Private companies generally don't share details about their approach, budget, roadmap or strategy leaving us with just the public data from space agency missions.
But you don’t need a billion-dollar budget or an army of scientists to achieve big things in space exploration. Whether you’re an amateur astronomer, a space enthusiast, or just curious about what it takes to venture into the unknown, this guide will walk you through our approach and roadmap of planning and executing a deep space mission with a (tiny) fraction of a NASA budget.
We’ll break down all of the different steps and design choices into understandable steps, offering practical advice on everything from designing a spacecraft to mission planning. We share how we make the most of limited resources, leverage open-source tools and leverage the community of citizen scientists who are already pushing the boundaries of space exploration.
In this first part, we’ll cover a baseline for space missions by looking in detail at 2 recent asteroid missions by JAXA and NASA. We compare these missions to the Karman+ High Frontier program, including an overview of our program budget.
Future posts will focus on deep dives into everything from launch and mission operations to component level analysis of the trades and choices we've made to design and build our spacecraft:
- Launch: Setting realistic goals and objectives for your deep space adventure.
- Designing and Building Your Spacecraft: Tips on constructing a spacecraft with readily available materials.
- Launching on a Budget: Exploring cost-effective options for getting your spacecraft off the ground.
- Navigating Deep Space: Understanding the basics of space travel and how to keep your mission on course.
- Communication and Data Collection: How to stay in touch with your spacecraft and gather valuable data.
Space development tends to be highly secretive, covered by confidentiality agreements for everything from specifications discussions to pricing between all parties. It is hard to draw lessons from past performance because data is often not made available or only shared when it paints a positive picture. This guide isn’t just about making space accessible – it’s about empowering you to become part of the next wave of exploration.
High Frontier vs Hayabusa2 vs OSIRIS-REx
Left to right: High Frontier -> Hayabusa2 -> OSIRIS-Rex
Total mission cost:
The mission cost for both Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx is publicly available although there are multiple competing numbers floating around in different publications. We used the median of estimates for the top down amount, adjusted that for inflation through 2025 to make sure we can compare like for like with our mission and built out the bottom up budgets at the spacecraft level as well. These item-level allocations are estimates combining known items alongside ratios using a SMAD baseline.
The Karman+ budget is a combination of CapEx and direct cost as well as the blended cost of engineering time across the program. We don't allocate company overhead in that roll-up which probably introduces some accounting differences against the public tracking setup used by
Most of the scaling in cost is pretty evenly distributed across different items, although there are some exceptions that stand out for various reasons.
With our focus on mining and excavation, a lot of the science instrumentation that was core functionality for the 2 agency missions is not present at all or significantly reduced. We are also running this first mission as a technology demonstration without a return to Earth, so the return capsule item is not included in our scope at all.
Looking at where we still have significant room for improvement at the spacecraft level, power and propulsion stand out as relatively expensive compared to most of the other items on our spacecraft.
We will dig into the various decisions and choices made in future posts across those subsystems, as well as other large drivers of cost such as launch and mission operations.
Our design decisions are just that at this point, the architecture and approach we are taking has not yet been validated by running a successful mission. Most of these converge under the fuzzy label of risk posture, which can clearly be very different for a commercial company as opposed to a space agency working with public money.