NASA's Europa Clipper Launch

ETA is 2030. Originally planned for a rocket (SLS) which would have delivered the Clipper in ~3 yrs, but which was decided to be not viable for the Clipper (with some lobbying suspected).

How much science is delayed by the extra 2+ years? Looking at the 'project plan', is the Clipper's arrival (and delivery of data) on the critical path for research? And how much research?

I'm picturing a lot of scientists and research projects waiting an extra 2-3 years, and then all the research, follow-on missions, etc. also delayed. Essentially, the decision might shift everything in this field 2-3 years further away, and then centuries from now human habitation of other planets is 2-3 years later (ok, a bit exaggerated).

But seriously, maybe it's not on the critical path or doesn't impact that much. Is anyone here familiar with the research?

> In late 2015, Congress directed NASA to launch Europa Clipper using the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA’s massive moon rocket.

> The SLS was still in development at the time, and would be for a number of years to come. Delays with the powerful rocket, and the need to dedicate at least the first three SLS vehicles to launches for NASA's Artemis moon program, pushed Europa Clipper’s liftoff date into limbo. (SLS debuted in late 2022, successfully sending the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission to the moon.)

> The 2021 U.S. House of Representatives budget proposal instructed NASA to launch Europa Clipper by 2025, and to do so on an SLS "if available." Those two crucial words put the probe on a path toward a commercial launch vehicle, which turned out to be a Falcon Heavy.

So while the flight time may be longer, at least the entire mission is derisked in that it was forced to get off the ground instead of wait for an appropriate gap within the SLS's launch capacity.

[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-europa-clipper-lau...

Using a commercial launch vehicle reduced the cost quite a bit (saved a billion on the vehicle itself and another billion by not having to design the payload to pass SLS's much more rigorous vibe checks). The $2b saved is about 10% of NASA's annual budget. The next mission to Titan has a budget of around $3b, for reference.

On top of that, there's no guarantee SLS would've actually been able to launch on schedule. The program has had a lot of setbacks, to put it lightly, and has only launched once so far (6 years later than it's original ETA). There's additional rockets in production but if it came down to it the manned SLS missions would probably get priority for political reasons.

> (with some lobbying suspected)

The lobbying was from the SLS side. Congress was set on forcing Europa Clipper to fly on SLS regardless of technicalities and only backed off because the Europa Clipper team made it clear they'd want an additional $1B to make the spacecraft able to handle the exceedingly rough ride SLS provides. They were perfectly happy handing $2B of taxpayer money to Boeing, but were unwilling to spend another $1B on science.

On top of that, it's worth considering that SLS wouldn't be ready to fly right now anyway. As it stands, they can't even manage to build one rocket per year, the Artemis-2 rocket has already been delayed to next year, so, Clipper would've launched 2-3 years later anyway.

Well, Congress specified it to use SLS, since they were looking for extra payloads. And then uncoupled it from SLS when it became clear it couldn't even handle one extra payload.

NASA, wisely, always benchmarked the mission on Falcon Heavy, and bailed from SLS as soon as they were allowed to.

Clipper on SLS was more of a "wouldn't it be neat" scenario than the intended mission design.

I don't have any special insider information, but from what I know about spaceflight I think we should be glad they used the Falcon Heavy instead of SLS.

SLS has been consistently delayed pretty much every year since its conception, most recently the Artemis 2 mission which was supposed to fly this year is now delayed to next. It has only flown one time, now two years ago. It's also an order of magnitude more expensive than the Falcon Heavy with each flight costing upwards of $2 billion.

My guess is if they had been stuck with SLS this mission would not get to Europa until significantly later, if at all.

This presumes that an additional SLS rocket would have been completed and ready to launch in the same timeframe as this launch on Falcon Heavy. From what I have seen of the SLS program I think that is an unlikely scenario.

You don't think SpaceX did any lobbying? They just passively stood aside? Look at this story, about SpaceX, via the Project 2025 think tank's FOIA requests, searching for NASA employees who has written things critical of SpaceX:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757578

It's really hard to discuss any topic that brushes SpaceX tangentially on HN. I asked about the research, not about the rockets, but if one even mentions SpaceX in anything less than glowing terms they get six (so far) responses re rockets, all defending SpaceX, and not a mention of the research.

NASA and SLS are actually the property of the people posting; their mission is to serve all Americans. SpaceX is a private business, whose mission is to serve only itself and, in the practice of its owner's businesses, has zero regard for everyone else.

In that context it's bizarre that people are fans of the latter. In context of social media, where mass influence is bought, it's perhaps what we'd expect - that's not NASA's business.

> private business, whose mission is to serve only itself

Any private business's primary mission is to serve its customers - in order to even exist.

By theory and - especially these days - by practice, private business is there to enrich its owners.

One way it does that is to serve customers, another is to manipulate, cheat, and squeeze them of every dime the business can get, and then drop them for higher-margin customers. Just look at modern business.

>It's really hard to discuss any topic that brushes SpaceX tangentially on HN. I asked about the research, not about the rockets, but if one even mentions SpaceX in anything less than glowing terms they get six (so far) responses re rockets, all defending SpaceX, and not a mention of the research.

Everyone's just pointing out the obvious fact that SLS wasn't going to be able to do the mission on time or at cost anyway, so the delays were happening regardless, and Falcon Heavy was the only other option. You phrased your question with the assumption that SLS was going to launch on-time, added in the implication that SpaceX lobbied for the launch and caused research to be delayed by a few years, then decided to complain that everyone else was being biased.

>NASA and SLS are actually the property of the people posting; their mission is to serve all Americans. SpaceX is a private business, whose mission is to serve only itself and, in the practice of its owner's businesses, has zero regard for everyone else.

SLS is the property of Boeing, another private business. Its mission is to transfer vast sums of taxpayer money to Boeing under a contract whose terms remove any expectations of good performance and whose use in Artemis is legally mandated by Congress for no technical reason. The NASA Office of Inspector General has constantly been expressing serious concerns over how bad of a deal SLS is for the American people. We've also had genuine technological progress held back because Congressmen wanted to transfer money to SLS. Its ever inflating costs threaten actually useful science programs every year. I don't see how anyone who actually wants American leadership in space can support it.

SpaceX, as you have noted, is also a private business. With NASA being one of its biggest customers, they are obviously beholden to NASA's desires. Unlike Boeing, who has explicitly expressed their intent to refuse contracts which properly hold the company responsible for under-performing, SpaceX consistently insists on such contracts. Currently, they provide most launch services to NASA and have saved NASA billions over the years. They maintain a mutually beneficial relationship, where NASA gains all sorts of valuable data and capabilities from SpaceX's private development efforts, and SpaceX gains business from NASA.

If you're dismissing this as a social media influence thing, despite all the technical points presented to you, then all that shows is that you were just concern trolling in your original post and have no interest in actually having your question answered.

If I was part of the Europa Clipper project, I would simply be happy to see it healthy and on the way to Europa. It was not at all clear that an SLS rocket would be available to launch it in the time frame where it would have arrived substantially earlier than it will now, and on top of that there were questions about whether the vibrational environment on SLS would mandate expensive and time-consuming modifications to the spacecraft.

All in all, it would not surprise me if it reaches Europa earlier this way. But, of course, we will never know.

Some irony in this post.

> private business is there to enrich its owners

The value captured by the owners is a tiny slice of the value provided to the society. For example, the value I get from my iPhone is much much greater than the money I pay for it - it's just logical, I simply wouldn't buy it otherwise.

And the value received by the owners is the well deserved reward for creating the business - a very hard and low chance of success endeavor - but essential to our society.

Everything in my life is created by private businesses: from the clothes on my back, the food I eat, the car I drive, the house I live in to the computer I earn my living and write this on.

I lived in a society without private businesses, under communism, and everybody was cold and starving.

NASA is popular, SLS is not.

The simple answer is that people do not believe much of what the government does is in service of the people. SLS is a great example of this.

Literally everybody in the whole space industry who isn't directly profiting from SLS knew Falcon Heavy was by far the superior option. It not even a topic worth debating, its literally so fucking obvious. SpaceX maybe lobbied, but it was irrelevant, because anybody with a brain already knew the right answer 5min after Falcon Heavy launched successfully.

The only question was if the SLS lobby was able to keep forcing SLS. That was the only topic worth debating. You can even track this to the specific people in congress who are known to be in certain districts who tried to force this.

Here is some research you can go do, look at the price and availability of Falcon Heavy, then look at the price and availability of SLS. No more research is needed.

Funny how SLS that feeds literally billions of $ into the pockets of Boeing and Lockheed Marin 'serve all Americans' and SpaceX that makes a profit of a few 10s of million $ is 'private'. You see how that perspective is utterly idiotic right?

It saved far more then 1 billion $ for the launch vehicle. That number is just more SLS propaganda. If you actually do the research its far more. At least 1 $ billion more and that is the very best case, not accounting for any amortized development. In reality its likely considerably more.

SLS isn't actually available and would have required considerable amount of extra work on Clipper that would have taken years. So no research is actually delayed.

Clipper would have to have a schedule fight with Artemis and Clipper very likely would have lost that fight. SLS scaling is very slow so its very likely using SLS would have meant a later arrival.

Either way, one of Clipper or Artemis would have been delayed, this is a 100% fact. So either way one timeline of an important project is delayed.

You ask these scientists if they rather wait a little longer (again questionable) or if they would rather have 2-4 billion $ in extra research grants. That would be a more fair comparison. Now NASA can use that budget actually useful things rather then giving more money to Boeing.

Manipulate, cheat and squeeze them for every dime is literally why SLS exists. Please for the love of good do some research on the topic.