From Ars Technical: "NASA officially greenlights $3.35 billion mission to Saturn’s moon Titan." From the lede:
NASA has formally approved the robotic Dragonfly mission for full development, committing to a revolutionary project to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone.
Agency officials announced the outcome of Dragonfly's confirmation review last week. This review is a checkpoint in the lifetime of most NASA projects and marks the moment when the agency formally commits to the final design, construction, and launch of a space mission. The outcome of each mission's confirmation review typically establishes a budgetary and schedule commitment.
If all goes well, the craft will launch in July 2028. The article adds:
Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan's surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
"The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before,” Turtle said in a statement. “The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."
The article notes that the cost of the mission is significantly higher than other missions to the gas giants and outer solar system. But to put this in perspective, the additional $60 billion that Congress decided to flush down the toilet by providing even more aid to Ukraine could has paid for 17 such NASA missions.
Of course, that wasn't the total price of our current wars: Congress' total "aid" bill was $95 billion including $17.18 billion for Israel to buy even more weapons for Israel's Reconquista, $9.2bn for humanitarian purposes in Gaza and the West bank (hey, even terrorists need super yachts), $60.84 billion for the Ukraine war (including $23 billion to replace U.S. weapons stocks already turned over to Ukraine), and $8.12 billion of defense aid and spending in the Asia Pacific region, including Taiwan. So, for the total cost of this latest spending spree, we could have funded 28 Dragonfly Missions--or repaired the vast majority of bridges in the U.S.--or many other, worthier things. Hell, it would have been better to have paid down our National Debt or never to have spent the money in the first place so we didn't incur additional National Debt.
But funding exploration or domestic infrastructure is a sign of a healthy, growing country; while spending the national treasure on useless wars is a sign of civilizational decay.
That's pretty cool. I vote yes.
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