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.

[Mariner9]

This whole situation reminds me a lot of the early 80s. I will admit that we are in much better shape on the whole, with many missions flying, and several in developement. But in one reguard it seems like history repeating itself. The planetary scientists are obsessed with one mission, and a very expensive mission it is. They keep pushing it, and are circling the wagons insisting it is the one true next step. Yet the message continues to be from above: we can't fund a mission that big right now.

Well, that was about where we were with the Mars Sample Return mission in the post Viking years. Everyone kept pushing big missions, and the biggest was MSR. It took major pressure from NASA headquarters (and Congress) to get the point across that MSR wasn't going to happen as the next mission to Mars, and wasn't there something, anything, that could fly in the meantime.

Eventually NASA scaled back on Venus Radar Mapper... and Magellen was approved. Only a year later Mars Observer was approved. They were the first new starts in seven years, and the only happened because political reality was finally admitted, and NASA submitted missions that were low enough cost to fit within the current budget reality.

I agree with someone earlier who stated that it's one thing to get a 600 million dollar New Horizons Pluto mission approved by grass roots lobbying, but quite another to get a Flagship mission approved using the same game plan.

If history is a guide here, I'd think the best move at this point would be for the OPAG and like minded scientists to accept that a 1.4 billion dollar mission just is not going to happen. But a 700-800 million dollar mission might stand a chance.

Better to focus on moving up the next New Frontiers mission and having the competition be based on Outer planets only (Comets and Venus will have to wait). There is still a LOT that a Galileo type tour of the Jovian system could teach us, not only about Europa but also Io and the rest.