Congress: NASA must not only go to Europa, it must land, Ars Technica
“NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, has accepted the Europa mission only grudgingly. When NASA didn’t ask for Europa funding in its 2013 or 2014 budgets, Culberson gave it a total of more than $120 million. Finally, in its fiscal year 2015 budget request, NASA acquiesced and created a Europa program. The president’s budget called for $15 million to begin preliminary studies. Culberson appropriated $100 million. For fiscal year 2016, NASA requested $30 million. It got nearly six times that. Now that NASA has accepted an orbital mission to Europa, the biggest point of contention has been a lander. During a November interview with Ars, Bolden explained why he didn’t want to tackle such an ambitious mission. “My scientific community, the people who do mission planning, say we need to go and do a little research with the first mission to Europa to determine whether that’s a place we want to send a lander,” Bolden said. “That’s the point of our big disagreement with Congressman Culberson right now. He wants a multibillion dollar Europa mission that has a lander on the first flight and everything. Our belief is that that is imprudent from a scientific perspective.”

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

22 replies on “Charlie Bolden Is Afraid of Europa. Congress Is Not.”

  1. It doesn’t sound like he’s afraid of planetary protection issues. More likely he’s just afraid of committing NASA to another large-scale robotic mission under his watch – remember how the guy wanted to cancel Mars 2020 because Mars Curiosity was “successful”? I almost wonder if he just doesn’t like flagship-level robotic missions period. The guy’s a care-taker, not ambitious.

    In any case, good for Culberson. It’d pretty awesome if he used his budgetary power to effectively upgrade the Europa mission into a billion-dollar-plus flagship-level mission, complete with lander. Let’s be honest, too – if we don’t send a lander mission with Europa Clipper in the early 2020s, it’s going to be a very long time before we ever get another shot at it. Mars continues to suck up a lot of planetary exploration political oxygen, and the next flagship mission after Mars 2020 is probably going to be either Sample Return from Mars or an Ice Giant mission.

    1. Agreed. While it does seem prudent to stick to the typical flyby-orbiter-lander timeline of risk mitigation, we are possibly clever enough now to just jump in and send a lander, or perhaps a penetrator.

      The incremental cost of adding a lander is small compared against the cost and time of mounting an entire mission.

      1. It’s not incremental, because the lander needs to carry enough fuel to slow down and land. A lander will have to be large, possibly as large as the orbiter by itself. It’s effectively making two flagship missions at the same time. Adding a lander at least doubles the cost of the mission.

        1. That’s still an increment. And the decades saved waiting between launch opportunities and mission funding is a complete and utter win for a combined mission.

      1. I don’t think Obama cares about space except in so much that it doesn’t cost him any exceptional amount of money or generate scandals. Bolden’s probably got more leeway here than he uses.

        1. I disagree. Obama said we’re going to Mars, and Charlie knows more than anyone how much focus and money that’s going to take. If Obama announced tomorrow that we’re going to Europa, Charlie would get on board real quick.

    3. Mars will suck up budget.
      This is a great mission.
      Culberson probably fell into it as a Texas representative. Does he have some kind of knowledge about space that makes his budget addition vision over district $?

    4. The planned Europa mission is already a “billion-dollar-plus flagship-level mission.” I believe the estimated cost is around $2 billion, and that’s without a lander or launch costs.

      If you mean adding the lander is worth a billion or two more, that’s a different. I might say disagree (for an extra billion or two, they might be able to go back to an orbiter, and that might be better than a lander.) But let’s be clear about the current baseline mission.

  2. “Endemic project cost increases at NASA begin when scientists and engineers (and sometimes Congress) burden missions with features beyond what is affordable in the stated budget. The problem continues with managers and contractors who accept or encourage such assignments, expecting to eventually be bailed out.”

    In reading about budget accuracy issues, which Keith is raising as one of the major reasons NASA is perpetually 20 years away from landing on Mars, I came across the aboce quote from Alan Stern.

    I guess, at least in this case, Congress is leading with money in order to add the desired features. I hope it is enough.

  4. There are two errors here that really need to be corrected.

    First, the story is wrong to describe the current mission as “an orbital mission to Europa.” The planned mission does thirty-odd close flybys of Europa, but does not go into orbit.

    Second, Bolden’s statement implies that scientists aren’t sure if they’d want a Europa lander, and the flyby results are needed to decide. I’ve been at numerous OPAG meetings where lander concepts were presented and discussed. I don’t think there is any doubt a lander would be valuable. But only if you can put it down in the right place. Without flyby data, you can’t do adequate site selection, and without that, a lander could end up at a fairly useless location. Needing more information for site selection isn’t the same as needing more information to justify a lander at all. Bolden seemed to imply the later.

    1. Could this funding have something to do with the launch vehicle? According to the JPL page the flight time is 6 years on the Atlas. The SLS would reduce it to three years but that is less of a change than I had expected from previous discussion.

      1. I have no idea what is in the recently-passed FY16 budget. I haven’t read through the full text yet. But the planned budget for the mission does not include launch costs, and in the FY15 budget, NASA was directed to fly the Europa mission on SLS. So I don’t think the added money has to do with the launch costs. In any case, SLS is required for any sort of lander: An Atlas isn’t enough for the planned spacecraft _and_ a lander.

          1. It really depends on what sort of lander you want. Last year, ESA was asked about providing a 250 kg lander (or subspacecraft.) As I understand it, they concluded that a soft lander wasn’t viable but a hard lander with limited instruments might be. I would expect a soft lander with a decent instrument complement to be at least a factor of five more massive, but that’s just an educated guess. Lifetime on the surface, and how late in the mission it lands (E.g. waiting for ~20 flybys for site selection) are also factors. Given the radiation, longer means more shielding and more mass.

  5. This is just my opinion, but I think the money would be better spent developing a small reactor power unit. The US launched a nuclear reactor into space in 1966 and we have not repeated it since. A reactor would vastly reduce launch safety hazards (compared to an RTG) since it contains only uranium at launch. A reactor could provide energy for the astonishingly powerful Hall effect thrusters now available that could provide the impulse to actually explore the outer planets, where the Sun is too dim for SEP. It would enable many missions over many years.

    1. Keeping it small might be a problem. Reactors don’t scale down well. If you don’t keep it small, you describing the JIMO (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter) concept of the early 2000s. That involved nuclear electric propulsion, a 100 kWe reactor and a budget that went up above $10 billion before the idea was abandoned. An additional problem is that electric propulsion takes months to years to leave Earth orbit (assuming it starts from LEO) and by that time, the reactor is no longer cold.

      1. The chemical stage can bump it to Earth escape velocity without being huge, and the SNAP10A is still in Earth orbit at 1,300 kilometers, where it will stay until someone moves it. Hall effect thrusters are getting a lot more powerful with thrusts to 1N per thuster; 100kWe could power five of them, with exaust velocities of 10-30 km/second. http://www.busek.com/techno…

        As to the cost, I agree it would not make sense if the technology were only going to be used once and dropped, as was the case with the SNAP 10A https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… .

        1. Well, I’m not exactly disagreeing with you.

          I’m fine with a fast reactor on a 1300 km altitude orbit (4000 year estimated decay time, which is almost but not exactly the same as “until someone moves it”) but a fair number of people object. So I’ll let you write the environmental impact statement.

          1000 kWe electric was for the JIMO/Prometheus concept, and it was intended for more than one mission. But the cost was huge and the other applications included military/national security ones, and a fair number of people objected to that.

          The specs you quote for a Hall effect thruster are also close to the theoretical limit. At 100% efficiency, power is exhaust velocity times thrust. So five, at 20 km/s and 1 N is 100 kWe at 100% efficiency. You can’t get much better than.

          For planetary science (not human spaceflight), I’d say ~10 kWe is about all you’d really need.

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