Rightsizing LISA
  The LISA science requirements and conceptual design have been fairly stable
for over a decade. In the interest of reducing costs, the LISA Project at NASA
has looked for simplifications of the architecture, at downsizing of
subsystems, and at descopes of the entire mission. This is a natural activity
of the formulation phase, and one that is particularly timely in the current
NASA budgetary context. There is, and will continue to be, enormous pressure
for cost reduction from both ESA and NASA, reviewers and the broader research
community. Here, the rationale for the baseline architecture is reviewed, and
recent efforts to find simplifications and other reductions that might lead to
savings are reported. A few possible simplifications have been found in the
LISA baseline architecture. In the interest of exploring cost sensitivity, one
moderate and one aggressive descope have been evaluated; the cost savings are
modest and the loss of science is not.
