Is Europa really the "highest priority" of the community?, Cleave said it was at LPSC? Options

[mcaplinger]

From Emily's LPSC blog: "Bob Pappalardo would not sit down until he got Cleave to acknowledge that Europa is the consensus highest priority of the planetary science community."

Cleave was obviously poorly prepared for this session, but I don't see that this acknowledgement is either meaningful or particularly accurate. If Europa were the "highest priority" of the PS community as a whole, then one might wonder why we were spending all this money on Mars. I could easily imagine that Europa is the highest priority of the outer planets community, but frankly I was surprised when Europa Orbiter appeared in the '07 budget (presumably the result of some serious lobbying on someone's part.) It was pretty obvious to me then that there would be no money for it, especially in the aftermath of JPL running the old EO project into the ground with cost overruns and engineering upscopes. (And JIMO is best forgotten.)

Don't get me wrong, I would love to be involved with a Europa mission (we did what I think was a good proposal design for EO) but I don't see either the money or the political support being there in the near term. I know it's frustrating, but one has to be realistic, and it might help to avoid the aura of entitlement that I perceive is building in some parts of the community (not referring to you, Bob). Of course, I am just a lowly engineer.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

If Europa were the "highest priority" of the PS community as a whole, then one might wonder why we were spending all this money on Mars. I could easily imagine that Europa is the highest priority of the outer planets community, but frankly I was surprised when Europa Orbiter appeared in the '07 budget (presumably the result of some serious lobbying on someone's part.) It was pretty obvious to me then that there would be no money for it, especially in the aftermath of JPL running the old EO project into the ground with cost overruns and engineering upscopes. (And JIMO is best forgotten.)

First, as I said, Mars is in a category all by itself -- the NASA brass recognize it as a gold mine for them funding-wise, and so missions for it are considered super-high priority by NASA regardless of what the actual planetary-science community thinks. (Jeff Bell tells me that Mars scientists, who benefit from this, are bitterly known by other planetary scientists as the "Mars Mafia".)

Second, I found out at the Europa Focus Group meeting who got Europa Orbiter into the 07 budget. As is so often the case, this was due to idiosyncratic personal enthusiasm by one Congressman --- John Culbertson of Texas, who showed up at the meeting to excoriate the removal of EO again and to swear undying enmity against any further attempts to delay it. He is an otherwise standard-model right-wing Republican who happens to be an amateur astronomer and geologist, with the result that he is apoplectic about the cuts in space science but isn't (yet) willing to buck the President by trying to pull money out of Shuttle/Station. (He said that he personally takes a dim view of it , but that NASA is stubborn in refusing to cut its funding.) As a result, he proposes to refund space science by increasing NASA's funding as a whole -- which I imagine ain't gonna fly, but we'll see.

Anyway, he not only got EO into the initial '07 budget, but was responsible for restoring $10 million of the cut funding for SIM. He also said that he was largely responsible for the funding for Prometheus, and that when he got it funded he had Europa in mind as a goal for it. (I hope someone gets a chance to tell him about the unwisdom of using NEP to study Europa, or he may unintentionally veer us off onto an unwise detour.) So there is at least one genuine, honest-to-God Europa enthusiast in Congress -- which is more than a lot of space scientists have.