US funds Europa mission A mission to explore Jovian moon Europa, considered one of the solar system's better candidates to host life thanks to its possession of a liquid water ocean, is now in NASA's sights after the US government last week signed off $US75m in funds to scope a future visit. The money was allocated in the “Consolidated and Further …
Why send probes, send people.....
Sure it will cost more, but the science, so much more can be accomplished with real people on the ground (Talking Mars here not Europa)
Actually for once do a true global mission, get Europe, China & Russia working together and send a manned mission to mars!
I would suggest including America, but we all know if China is involved they won't be, and I'd rather work with the Chinese given a choice...
However one of the interesting little factoids from the NIAM's presentations was that using a solar sail could have cut the 35 transit time from Earth to helipause of Voyager to about 10 yrs (with the same science payload mass).
This was a design mfg on Earth and unfurled in space. Later presentation described on orbit construction machines which could (in principal) make a very light weight framework as it would not have had to survive launch loads.
Perhaps they should start backwards with the question "How big a rocket can we get our hands on and what does that give us in terms of payload to Europa?"
Thumbs up for this. Let's just repeat Europa has liquid water on it in large amounts. While Mars seems the most Earthlike (size, gravity) there is a lot of real estate in the solar system.
And all this stuff about life on Europa will sort itself out.
More seriously, we need to figure out what NASA should be doing in the age of austerity. I vote for more robotic missions, detecting asteroids and other earth-threatening objects and supporting cheap orbital access. Got to put manned missions on hold until we get cheap access to orbit licked.
A: Doing research that the Private sector ISN'T doing. Spaceplanes or a Shuttle-replacement come to mind. Alternative propulsion theories, alternative fuels (metallic hydrogen is a LONG way off but it's worth checking out) and so on.
B: Sending probes/orbiters/landers to other planets and doing data analysis.
C: Doing Earth observation and data analysis.
It SHOULDN'T be competing with ULA/SpaceX et al to build big expensive rockets, or at least should be paying for it out of its own budget. NASA has a lot of old, aging infrastructure and some of it has little to do with points A to C above.
we can blow trillions for banks to buy up their competition, millions to fly presidential families to vacations around the world (with their multiton armored vehicles, royal retinues and security/military personnel. We can throw away more in foreign aid and to people who haven't contributed anything to society other than crime statistics in three generations.
But we can't find money for our own supercollider, or a Mars mission or a deep solar system probe.
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