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Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Like so many great leaps for mankind, getting a human to one of Jupiter's moons must begin with a small step. And Objective Europa is aiming to do exactly that. A small team — architects, futurist designers, private space pioneers and even Jacques Cousteau's son — is beginning the planning stage to send human beings on a one-way trip to the Jovian moon Europa. The effort is headed up by Kristian Von Bengston, the founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals, an open source DIY space program based in his native Denmark. And he's quite serious about transporting a man or woman beyond our atmosphere, Mars and the asteroid belt."
I think our society has become too risk averse. Not only are many people more terrified of 1 in a million occurrences like terrorism and serial killers than truly dangerous activities like driving, many want the government to prevent others from engaging in risky behavior even when they only risk harm to themselves.
Case in point, I'm pretty sure if this was attempted there would be considerable debate on whether someone should be allowed to volunteer for a suicide mission like this. Yet no one ever questioned the sanity of anyone wishing to fly on the space shuttle with it's 1 out of 67.5 chance per flight of killing you in a massive fireball..