Feb 122021
 

And not on the bloated, far behind schedule and vastly over budget SLS:

NASA to use commercial launch vehicle for Europa Clipper

EC will instead fly on a commercial launch vehicle, as yet undetermined but very likely to be a Falcon 9 Heavy. The F9H is indeed a capable vehicle, but it does not have the throw weight that SLS is supposed to have, so instead of a three-year direct flight to Jupiter the spacecraft will take a more circuitous six-year flight that does gravity assists past Earth and Mars. An advantage of that is that after an October 2024 launch, the probe will do a  flyby of Earth in December of 2026; it should be interesting to compare views of Earth of “before and after,” what with the new radioactive pock marks, ash clouds, scorched regions that the next some years are looking likely to feature.

And from another direction, the loss of the Europa Clipper mission is just one more “why the hell are we spending money on this monstrosity” nail in SLS’s ginormous coffin.

 Posted by at 6:09 pm