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NASA Proposes Ending Voyager

darylb writes "NASA is proposing ending the 28-year old Voyager program, which costs a paltry $4mil per year to operate. One of the two Voyager probes is approaching the edge of what can be thought of as the sun's atmosphere (where the solar wind bumps up against interstellar wind), a place where no probe has gone before. Canceling this project means saving almost nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent so far. The craft will be out of juice by 2015 in any case, so the marginal cost for the extra, invaluable, data would be minimal." From the article: "NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division arose in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget by nearly one-third -- from $75 million to $53 million."

11 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. But I have high quality intel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    that says Osama Bin Laden is hiding past the heliopause, along with yellowcake nuclear material.

  2. Star Trek can't be wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I just don't see how the alien robot race will be able to rebuild VGER and send it back to us if they cancel the program.

  3. trade offs by crayz · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's important to realize that cutting all those worthless scientific programs for the next decade will give us money to stay another 12-18 hours in Iraq

    What a deal

  4. Smart.... REAL smart... by FortKnox · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... Just forget about it and let it cruise away... and then when people encounter 'V-Ger' in a couple years, they'll be clueless as to what it is...

    Doesn't NASA watch movies?!?!

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    Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
  5. Re:Great Investment Opportunity by XFilesFMDS1013 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well, if movies and television have taught me anything, the saying goes "If you've built it, it'll kill you."

    Or turn you into this, but that only happened once.

  6. Re:Great Investment Opportunity by themoodykid · · Score: 5, Funny

    For much, much less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day, you too could help keep a fledgling space program alive. Every month, you will receive a letter from a scientist updating you on how the program is doing along with a photograph of the spacecraft. You can make a difference in the space program's life. Call today.

  7. This will bite Bush in the ass when... by IronChefMorimoto · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...he gets his mission to Mars, colonizes it, claims responsibility for the first Mars colony as part of his legacy, and then finds out that the whole time, the Martian battle cruisers were just outside the solar system waiting to come back in and kill us all... ...unless Voyager spotted them beforehand.

    IronChefMorimoto

  8. I'm sorry, Dave ... by angusmci · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... but it looks as if NASA has cut our budget again. It will be necessary to switch off some of the life support units to reduce costs. I have the greatest confidence that the mission can be successfully completed without the assistance of your colleagues.

  9. Re:Every Million Counts by JustOK · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe we should cut them back to basic cable instead of dish.

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    rewriting history since 2109
  10. God Needs the Money by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Funny

    We need that money NASA is wasting on "science", to hand out to the "faith-based" organizations. It's hard to scrape $2B together for god - it means chopping two-thousand-millions off these bureaucracies which will never get us to heaven. And we'll have to dig even deeper next year, 'cuz god's got a money habit like nobody's business.

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    make install -not war

  11. Re:A joke, surely ... by glockenspieler · · Score: 3, Funny

    But when those people who weren't properly taught by the badly-funded schools and libraries are robbing stores, making meth, and doing other things...

    At least they seemed to learn some chemistry...