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It's such a shame that the lander component of Europa Clipper got cancelled.
by dotnet00 3y ago
It's such a shame that the lander component of Europa Clipper got cancelled.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt did?! :(. Shame. We should be scrambling to land probes there yesterday.
- dotnet00 3y agoYep, yet another casualty of Congress's obsession with wasting money on SLS. Spending another $10B on an SLS upgrade that is still too rough of a ride for any payload is fine, but spending $1B on a lander is too much. With Europa Clipper there was also the incident that Congress tried to write into law that it had to launch on SLS. The Clipper team were leaning towards using Falcon Heavy ($90M). In the end Congress only relented because the Clipper team said they'd need another $1B in funding (in addition to the $2B+ for an SLS launch itself) to make the delicate instruments on Clipper capable of withstanding the extremely rough ride that SLS offers. So now Europa Clipper will be a Jupiter orbiter that does several flybys of Europa.