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Fly Me To Which Moon?
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA and the European Space Agency are expected later this week to settle an ongoing debate on whether to send a robotic mission to Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Titan. Both are difficult places to get to — a mission to either would cost several billion dollars/euros to build and execute — and both have become alluring targets in the quest to learn whether Earth alone supports life. On the one hand, Europa is believed to have liquid oceans beneath its frozen crust which (on Earth at least) are a source of life-supporting chemistry. Scientists would like to scan Europa's surface for bits of material that may have seeped up from beneath the ice. 'Imagine if there were microbes entrained in material that has exuded onto the surface of Europa and they've been sitting there for maybe three million years,' says planetary scientist Dr. Brad Dalton. On the other hand, Titan has two enticing features in the search for life: liquids on the surface, and a thick atmosphere that can be used to slow down a spacecraft and help put it into orbit. Titan's surface water is locked into the crust as ice, but scientists suspect there may be a subsurface ocean where water mingles with ammonia. The mission will not get to the launch pad before 2020. 'It's unfortunate that there has to be a decision,' says NASA/JPL astrobiologist Dr. Kevin Hand. 'It's important to go to both. They are both such amazing and tantalizing worlds in terms of finding life.'"
If we had worked on cheaper access to space first, we could have both.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
We can throw as much money as we like at the Halliburtons of this world and rain the national vault to fund wars which enrich our leadership's business cronies. We can use whatever's left over to bailout people so greedy and incompetent that they'll ever change their ways.
But we have to choose between Europa or Titan.
Deflation might suck if you are already loaded up with debt, but not all of us are. I kind of like the idea of having everything drop in price, except for my wage that is. It might actually encourage me to take out a loan.
And let's face it, the odds that we're screwing up our only livable habitat in potentially-ugly ways are increasing. Developing the capacity to move at least a few people elsewhere isn't such a terrible idea.
And then do what with them once they're there? If we can terraform any other planet into a habitable place, it's hard to see why we couldn't do it to Earth to undo the environmental damage we've wrought. After all, Earth currently is habitable and anything we're likely to do wouldn't move it further from that mark than the other planets.
Kill research on a Mars mission and find out more about the universe in general before the resources run out. Kill the Mars mission and fund the rest.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Mass production and standard designs only work if we have a _lot_ of missions, not once every decade or two, in which case the technology is wildly different. If price were no object we could launch to Jupiter every 13 odd months, but for Saturn and beyond there's always that pesky detail of waiting for a gravity assist.