NASA Taps SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket To Launch Jupiter Moon Mission (cnet.com) 44
Jupiter's unusual icy moon Europa may be one of the best spots in the solar system to check for signs of alien life. But first we have to get there. NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft will get a boost in the right direction from a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, one of the most powerful rockets ever built. From a report: NASA announced Friday that it has selected SpaceX to provide the launch services for the Jupiter moon mission. The launch is scheduled for October 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is worth about $178 million. Europa Clipper will try to determine if the moon could possibly host life. "Key mission objectives are to produce high-resolution images of Europa's surface, determine its composition, look for signs of recent or ongoing geological activity, measure the thickness of the moon's icy shell, search for subsurface lakes, and determine the depth and salinity of Europa's ocean," said NASA. SpaceX has been working with NASA on many fronts, including carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, delivering cargo to the ISS and developing a human landing system to return astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program.
Vastly improve the likeliness of the launch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Vastly improve the likeliness of the launch (Score:2)
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Falcon Heavy [Re: Vastly improve the likelines...] (Score:5, Informative)
Isnt a SpaceX launch under $70m?
This is a Falcon Heavy, not a Falcon-9.
Re: Vastly improve the likeliness of the launch (Score:5, Informative)
Isnt a SpaceX launch under $70m? Is this launch going to take the first stage with it and therefore no reuse? Or is the second stage beefier? Wondering why the cost is $178m.
This is a "heavy" (so starts at around $150M list), and it will be partially expendable. Regardless, it is a great deal, saving NASA nearly $1.5B (and who knows how much time) waiting for an available SLS booster.
Thanks to congressional mandates, the SLS (Senate Launch System) has been continued long after it was clear that it was the wrong rocket at the wrong time. Almost everyone agrees that it should be cancelled.
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Re: Vastly improve the likeliness of the launch (Score:5, Informative)
What Congress knows is that SLS is a make-work jobs program that touches just about every single state in the Union. There's a lot of support in the Senate for NASA pork, and SpaceX just doesn't bring home the bacon for all senators the way that ULA does.
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E . . . M . . . fly hoome!
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"Almost everyone agrees that it should be cancelled." Except for 100 individuals, for whom this system is unofficially named. (And, I suppose, the contractors getting paid.)
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I think an article I saw has the cost of this particular launch under $200M. Which is about 10% of the price of an SLS. And they are probably not recovering the core stage because they'll need every bit of deltaV it can offer.
Seems like a hell of a bargain as long as it doesn't fail.
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That's okay, it's unlikely the probe itself will be ready by the deadline either due to pandemic and budgets, meaning they may be "tardy at the same time".
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Feels like we have no national pride in the US. SLS is really just a jobs program, the goal is to extract money and its nice if a rocket comes out too.
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Interesting mission potential (Score:1)
If Europa is spewing water from its subsurface via ice volcanos, then the probe may be able to directly "sniff" the plums for life signs.
The Cassini probe did something similar near Enceladus to get a chemical signature of live plums, but wasn't designed for life detection, as live plums weren't known about at launch.
This time we can be ready. However, reliable life detection has proven a messy business because inorganic chemistry can mimic features of known life. But probing is a starting point.
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Quiet or I shall go to work for for slashdot as a dupe checker
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That would be a plum job!
Actually, I think they meant "plumb", as in "plumb the depths of Europa."
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No, I think they meant "plumes".
https://www.thefreedictionary.... [thefreedictionary.com]
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"Spewige"?
At that price (Score:3)
Nobody can compete.
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Well, ANYONE could have competed originally. It was originally slated for SLS.
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Well, ANYONE could have competed originally. It was originally slated for SLS.
And, more specifically, Congress had originally mandated that it would fly on SLS: NASA had no say in the matter.
Which might not have been a completely terrible idea (SLS has a tremendous throw weight)... if the funding had been put in place to make the production rate of SLS at more than one per year. But with the funding Congress gave NASA for SLS, there simply wouldn't be a SLS vehicle available for Europa: Congress was simultaneously mandating "you must launch on SLS" and "You can't have a SLS because t
Starlink the hell out of Europa (Score:5, Funny)
India hid the Pokhran tests from US satellites as they knew what times of the day the US Satellites are overhead. And US had 3 satellites spying on India. We send one probe at a time to Mars and dont see anything. Do we really think the Martians cant hide stuff as well as India?
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Your math has a problem: the probe isn't free. Europa Clipper cost $4B to build without the launcher, so I'm afraid the launcher savings, while still substantial, will not pay for 4 more spacecraft, or even 1 more spacecraft.
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You're suggesting a significant change in NASA's mission development process, which in and of itself would be expensive and time-consuming. These things are hand-crafted, so to speak, so you don't automatically get economies of scale automatically when building more than one - you'd have to retool and retrain.
I suspect NASA will take the savings and use them to enable a different, otherwise-unfunded mission.
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If they launch five for the price of one, and 60% of them fail, they still come out ahead. Hell, under those conditions, brake-even is 80% failure rate...
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I always knew it!
Mass production is a myth!
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whoosh!
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Its not the point you're trying to make, but seismic sensors knew instantly when India tested their bombs. I guess this makes clear what the real reason for us putting the INSIGHT seismometer on Mars. Tracking those Martian nukes!
Search for seismic in this article.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.or... [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
Notable (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's notable that this mission originally had a legal requirement to launch on SLS. SpaceX getting this launch contract literally took an act of congress.
Sadly that's how the sausage is made. You can do your science if it means X money goes to my state.
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hmm, build a launch platform over the SLS, launch the falcon heavy with lander from *that*, and then use the SLS from something else . . . :)
"The deal also saves NASA about $2 billion" (Score:2)
$2B in 2021. Who knows how high that would be in 3 years when it's supposed to launch. And that's IF the SLS is ready.
As long as they don't try to land (Score:3)
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"This is Eartha, we land where we damned please!"
~ POOF ~
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In the novel, the message ended at "Attempt no landings there". Because there was no lame cold war subplot in the novel.
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Read the book (Score:2)
If you're interested in Europa clipper, read The Mission: A True Story [amazon.com]
Meanwhile, Musk is tweeting anti-government memes (Score:2)
while shilling cryptocurrency [twitter.com]
So, Clovis Bray origins? (Score:1)