Onwards to Uranus and Neptune! Options

[SFJCody]

As soon as MESSENGER gets to Mercury, the most poorly explored planets in the solar system will be Uranus and Neptune. Could this lead to a revival of interest in the ice giants and their retinue, in the same way that the existence of New Horizons is perhaps partly due to the Pluto stamp*?







*via Pluto Fast Flyby and later Pluto Kuiper Express

[Mariner9]

Some years ago at a JPL open house I spoke with one of the engineers on Cassini. I asked about the reasoning behind using the Titan 4 vs. using the shuttle. It turns out it would have been cheaper to launch on the shuttle, but only by the way NASA does accounting. The price charged to the Cassini project would have been the processing fees and upper stage, and not the actual shuttle flight itself.

And it wasn't payload capacity or safety that were the main drivers either. It was schedule. The Cassini team figured they would rather rely on the Titan to get a launch accomplished during a planetary launch window. The shuttle, with it's frequent delays and down times was just too unreliable.

Not exactly on topic for this thread, but since everyone was discussing launch issues with the shuttle......