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Voyages on low-energy transfer orbits last decades, but you can send really heavy probes that would be impossible to fly on traditional trajectories. This make
by HarryHirsch 12y ago
Voyages on low-energy transfer orbits last decades, but you can send really heavy probes that would be impossible to fly on traditional trajectories.
This makes it into a political problem. Under the US system the budget for space exploration is allocated every year. All other governments allocate funds for the whole mission at the point when it is approved.
No government will commit funds for a flagship mission when they know that the US may pull out halfway through the project. It has happened before with Galileo, and no one will run the risk of it happening again, especially in the present political climate.
- jessriedel 12y ago> No government will commit funds for a flagship mission when they know that the US may pull out halfway through the project. It has happened before with Galileo, and no one will run the risk of it happening again, especially in the present political climate Could you explain what you mean here? Are you talking about international collaborative missions? Galileo was a successful NASA spacecraft to Jupiter that, as far as I can tell, was a fully American financed mission. Or maybe you're thinking of the Europa Jupiter System Mission, which was a NASA-ESA mission to Jupiter recently crippled by NASA budget cuts? That seems like a poor example, since only about $100 million or less had been spent on a mission that would have cost $6 billion (of which nearly $5 billion would have been American dollars).
- HarryHirsch 12y agoPart of the scientific payload was European. The European collaborators were not impressed with the delays on NASA's part. The combined Galileo/Ulysses disaster was what cured ESA of signing Memoranda of Understanding.