Mr nprev have involuntarily put me on the track with the proposal to reuse the New Horizons platform.
But why only borrow from the spacecraft design when you can reuse the spacecraft itself? This led me to the proposal for the Yo-yo exploration spaceprobe!

Unique solution

The Yo-yo spacecraft solves several of the problems that have ridden space explorations for decades.

All you need are a swinging homebase, so the Moon are one obviou choice. And secondly a good enough bearing system on the Yo-yo spaceprobe.

The Yo-yo spacecraft will also be able to return to base for refitting and then sent to new targets. When the spacecraft returns for refitting you can change whatever instruments you need for the next target and then send the spacecraft out on the next satellite or planet you’d like to explore.
By making it spin stabilized (something that comes inheritably with this design) it will not only save on fuel for stabilization but also be able to return or make several swingbys!

Many persons would like to publish their idea in one well known publication so that it will be saved for posteriority that they are the originator of the grand idea.
Not me, im too humble and give the idea away to you at UMSF - no strings attached!

I don't think reusing the same physical probe would actually save you much money. Most of the cost of a mission must be the overhead of launching and paying hundreds of people to plan and supervise the mission.

I do think there would be benefit in standardizing and modularizing spacecrafts and launch vehicles. That is something NASA has never been very good at, compared to the Soviets.

For example, Mars-3, Mars-5, Venera-9, Venera-15, and the Astron x-ray telescope all used the same spacecraft bus, with different orbital or landing modules plugged in. The bus was designed to relay high-bandwidth telemetry from landers, which was a large advantage over Amercian missions of that time period (thus Venera-11 was able to return about 100 times as much data as the Pioneer Venus landers).

You see a similar effect in rocket design. I'm generally a fan of free-market competition, but America's bewildering array of incompatable launch vehicles was a lot more expensive than Russia's mass produced R-7 rockets, which have flown more than 1600 missions. Look at how the Block-I stage was re-used for Voskhod, Molniya, Soyuz and the R-9 ICBM. Look at how the Block-L/Block-E stage was used and modified to perform Luna, Elektron, Vostok, and Molniya (both interplanetary and comsat missions). They got a lot of use out of well-planned modular units.

I also agree that a good special architecture which consists to standardize, modularize and homogenize the components, operations and organizations to improve the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, they will influence to help to reduce the costs of sending spacecraft.

Rodolfo

I think Myran has his tongue planted firmly in cheek from his "bearings" and "no strings attached" comments. I also note no mention of carbon nanotubes for the yoyo line which would indicate serious industry buzzword compliance. All we need to do is repurpose the space elevator folks to work on the proposal. Perhaps we could even do lander and rover style missions if the controllers could learn to "walk the dog."

Though it looks like there's a contractor already on the case...

Lord John Whorfin!

Oops.

Well in any case, modularization is good. And so are Thomas Pynchon's novels.

Agreed...and I approve of any launch trajectory that does not resemble Gravity's Rainbow...

There is no free lunch, there is no free launch...bad pun intended. It takes X amount of work to lift a probe into Earth orbit, plus the addtional work necessary for the time it takes to get there. A nanotube sky hook has all the same engineering challenges of a twenty mile long suspension bridge, without compression fixtures. It is as impossible today as aeroplanes were in the bronze age.