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NASA Proposes Ending Voyager

Posted by Zonk on from the lonely-traveler dept.

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."

2 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. Offtopic Sci-Fi Idea by $lingBlade · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Here's an idea that might or might not have already been written about.

    What if the Voyager (or any man-made probe) passed this *unknown* point in space, got sucked into a blackhole and dumped to another part
    of space time entirely. So far forward, backward or elsewhere in time/space that it was discovered by Aliens, who subsequently came to our planet to check things out.

    But they arrive in our primordial past and populate the Earth with a hybrid alien/animal mix. Making what would eventually become us humans?

    Yes I know, far fetched and whatnot, but like I said, just an idea... and a question in there somewhere.

  2. Solution to Budget Problems by wsherman · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    If, instead of having a national debt of roughly $7 trillion, the USA had a surplus of $40 trillion then it could loan the money out to other countries at a rate of 5% which would generate enough interest to pay for its entire $2 trillion yearly budget.

    People in the USA wouldn't have to pay taxes and they could also buy as much as they wanted from other countries without having to worry about a trade deficit creating a surplus of US dollars abroad causing devaluation of the US dollar.

    And, they wouldn't have to cut Voyager's budget either.