NASA robot plans mid-2020s trip: Europa. Wet, radioactive life forms (hopefully). Bliss NASA is plotting a mission to send its robotic lander to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons and the place deemed most likely to host life. The American space agency has reserved $15m of its $17.5bn annual budget to pay for a robotic journey to the icy moon. "Europa is a very challenging mission operating in a really high …
The Washington Post is speculating that the mission would cost $4.7 billion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/wp/2014/03/05/is-nasa-really-going-to-send-a-probe-to-europa/?tid=hpModule_1728cf4a-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e
It's early days, with two major different approaches mentioned just in the article above.
It's enough to pay for a team of around a dozen people for 7 or 8 years to work out the detail of what will be needed and what instruments can be fitted in to various launch configurations. Once they've got the plans worked out it will start needing real money to build and launch the spacecraft.
I think NASA is going to continue having difficulties getting other countries on board.
It has cancelled too many projects because of budget cuts leaving European and Japanese partners with a lot of time and money invested in a bit of kit that won't fly.
Chinese, Brazilian and Indian partners are annoyed at export rules that prevent US partners sharing the details of anything more advanced than an Apple-II with them - and have decided to just build their own infrastructure.
And I don't think there is going top be much political will on either side for a joint US - USSR++ mission
Yup, NASA just gave the finger to Germany by defunding SOFIA.
This is behavior that goes all the way back to the International Solar Polar Mission in '83 where the joint NASA/ESA mission suddenly became the ESA Ulysses mission.
One of the reasons that Ariane has so many payloads is because of the US ITAR crap. People don't want their satellites anywhere near the US because the paperwork becomes bigger than the rocket.
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The $15Mn is a FY2015 amount, it would likely recur for 5-10 years. The probe that is the lead-possibility is about $2Bn to build, but that could change. Then there are the costs to get-it-to-Jupiter and operate the mission.
Of course, the $15Mn staffing will look for savings and other activities that be also-done with this work.
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