[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Researcher Touts Saturn’s Titan As New Exploration Goal
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer, Space.com
posted: 14 March 2006
01:07 pm ET


"'Titan is just waiting for us…Titan wants us,' [Jonathan] Lunine suggested. 'There is no body in the outer solar system that is better designed for exploration than Titan.'"

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

What's really depressing about that story is that the difficulties of space science funding as a whole have already started encouraging rival researchers to start attacking each other's goals -- in this case, Lunine is using Europa Orbiter's troubles as an excuse to push money for Titan instead. Space scientists, in short, have now hit that stage in the "Raft of the Medusa" story where the cannibalism started.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

What's really depressing about that story is that the difficulties of space science funding as a whole have already started encouraging rival researchers to start attacking each other's goals -- in this case, Lunine is using Europa Orbiter's troubles as an excuse to push money for Titan instead. Space scientists, in short, have now hit that stage in the "Raft of the Medusa" story where the cannibalism started.

In case anyone missed Bruce's artistic allusion, he is referrring to Theodore Géricault's 1819 painting "The Raft of the Medusa," Oil on canvas, 491 x 716 cm, which is hanging in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Of course, Bruce probably recalls that I used this painting for a similar analogy in another group