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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 $53 million."
scroll down to the middle of this list and you might revise your thinking on uids vs actual people
It would zip past voyager in a couple of decades, more realistically. The last high profile mission with an ion engine took a year to reach the moon. Apollo took a few days. Ion engines are wonderfully fuel efficient, but they have incredibly low thrust. They also require a lot of power. Solar panels are fairly light, and work fine in the inner solar system. Solar panels are essentially useless out by Jupiter. So, you need a fairly heavy power generation system in order to power your ion engine, which means that the low thrust will impart an extremely low acceleration. (At least heavier than voyager, because it only had enough power to work electronics, and make heat. The ion engine would need *much* more energy than that.) Sure, after a few years of continuous burn, it'll be going fast, but it does have a long way to catch up.
Whoops, I was calculating for 10m$/yr. 4m$/yr? Heck, that's pretty cheap. Thinking about it, they're probably not using 100% of the time from a big radio receiver, so that probably explains the discrepancy. And their people might not all be Phds, and they might have lower rent.
What a crazy random happenstance!
Orion is a different thing from a nuclear rocket. A nuclear rocket uses a fission pile to generate energy, which is then used to heat a propellant to great temperature, expelling it at a higher velocity than chemical rockets.
The Russians had a very clever nuclear rocket (liquid metal IIRC) which used the same material for moderator, coolant, and propellant.
This in turn is different from ion drives, which (to oversimplify) use a particle accellerator for thrust. Ion drives have the best ISP of anything (most acceleration per wieght of fuel) but a poor thrust-to-mass ratio, so good for interplanetary travel but you can't get off the ground with one. Nuclear rockets don't have the ISP of ion drives, but they can be better than chemical roclets and still get off the ground.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sorry, but no. This is not a secret plan. Those who advise the Bush adminstration (like Grover Norquist, who is a frequent guest) have been very upfront that this is exactly what they want. Just do a search for Grover Norquist and "starve the beast." That's their name for what they want to do.