New Yorker :: What Galileo Saw
Article

> They now speculate that Europa’s global ocean
> may be more than thirty miles deep, which would
> mean that the moon has considerably more water
> than Earth. As Richard Terrile, a member of the
> nasa division that designed Galileo, has said, “How
> often is an ocean discovered? The last one was the
> Pacific, by Balboa, and that was five hundred years
> ago.”
>
> ...Randy Tufts died last year, at the age of fifty-three,
> from a bone-marrow disorder. Not long before his
> death, he was working with scientists on plans for
> an orbiter that would investigate Europa’s ocean
> more closely. In 2002, the project was cancelled,
> owing to budget cuts.

The successes of the Galileo orbiter described in this article offer a remarkable and mostly cheering tale of American pragmatism and ingenuity. Unfortunately, space exploration appears to be another casualty of the Bush administration's special economic priorities (read war and tax cuts.) One of those things apparently that free markets don't spontenously organize to promote.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 5:01 PM

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