Hidden almost unnoticed, tucked away in NASA’s fiscal 2021 funding portion of the recently passed omnibus spending bill, is a provision that appears to be freeing the upcoming Europa Clipper mission from the Space Launch System (SLS).
According to Space News, the mandate to launch the Europa Clipper mission on an SLS will only remain in effect if the trailing and overpriced heavy transport rocket is available and if concerns about hardware compatibility between the probe and the launch vehicle are resolved. Otherwise, NASA is free to look for commercial alternatives to get the Europa Clipper to Jupiter’s ice-shrouded moon.
Europa Clipper is planned to orbit Jupiter and perform multiple flight maneuvers near Europa, an icy world that many scientists believe has a warm ocean beneath the ice cover. Life may exist in that ocean, the confirmation of which would be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of this or any other century.
The Europa Clipper that had to fly an SLS to begin with was the result of an unseemly side of congressional budget policy. The space probe was defended by former Rep. John Culberson
John Abney Culberson Republicans In Texas Ring Alarm Bells After 2020 Platform Democratic Party 2020 Endorses Trump’s NASA Moon Program Bottom Line MORE (R-Texas), who at the time was the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA. To get support for the Europa Clipper, Culberson added the SLS mandate, which got support from Sen. Richard Shelby
Richard Craig Shelby Republican Power Struggle Over Election Steps Up Bipartisan Senators Group: Elections Are Over Bottom Line MORE (R-Ala.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations. Shelby’s state has involved a number of aerospace contractors involved in the development of the SLS.
Ironically, Culberson lost his seat in 2018, in part because his opponent, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas), accused him of being more concerned with space missions than local issues, such as flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. Nevertheless, the Europa Clipper went on without its main champion in Congress.
As Ars Technica points out, the launch of the Europa Clipper on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy will save the mission $ 1.5 billion. One benefit of using the SLS is that it allows a direct path to Jupiter without the time-consuming planetary flyby maneuvers required by previous missions to the outer planets. The Falcon Heavy alone wouldn’t be able to get the Europa Clipper straight into Jupiter space, although it could if equipped with a powerful Centaur trap.
Both the economics and physics of getting to Europe will change when SpaceX’s Starship, currently under development in Boca Chica, Texas, becomes available in the mid-2020s to launch the Europa Clipper. The Starship is intended to fulfill the CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk Will Axiom Space Replace a Commercial Space Station for NASA’s ISS? The world’s richest people added .8T to their combined net worth in 2020 Trump ends Obama’s 12-year run as most admired man: Gallup MORE‘s dreams of establishing Mars. But the massive reusable rocket would be available for other things, probably including sending probes to outer planets.
The huge cost savings of using a commercial launch vehicle for the Europa Clipper creates other opportunities. The Europa Lander can go back on. A mission to Saturn’s frozen world Enceladus can also be illuminated green.
The SLS is the result of a Faustian agreement between NASA and Congress in 2010. Congress was outraged by then President Obama’s cancellation of the Bush-era Constellation space exploration program. According to then NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, NASA agreed to the SLS in exchange for Congress backing the Commercial Crew program recently established with the launch of astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
The SLS has played an important role in America’s space travel ambitions ever since. The SLS that was planned to launch the Artemis 1 unmanned mission around the moon is currently stuck in a series of ground tests “green run”. The SLS is currently using much of the money allocated to NASA’s Artemis program. The first flight is scheduled for November 2021 at the earliest.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has flown prototypes of the Starship, albeit only in the atmosphere and with sometimes explosive results. NASA officially disdains the idea of replacing the SLS with the Starship. However, a version of the massive rocket ship SpaceX is in the running as a lunar lander for Artemis. It wouldn’t be too much of a leap to take out the SLS altogether and go straight with the Starship were it not for Congressional fiscal policy.
And that, as Shakespeare would say, is the problem.
Mark Whittington, who writes extensively on space and politics, has published a political study on space exploration entitled Why Is It So Hard To Go Back To The Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among others.