SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch NASA's Europa Clipper to icy Jupiter moon | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch NASA's Europa Clipper to icy Jupiter moon

space.com

146 points_Microft106 comments

Saving NASA $3B by doing so. It would have cost $2B to use the SLS rocket that Congress wanted them to use, and it would have cost another billion to rebuild Clipper to withstand the intense vibrations from SLS's solid rocket boosters.

dumb question - why are we using Saturn V derived rockets? afaik none of these new rockets can match its max payload

I assume you typoed and meant to ask “why aren’t” instead.

We aren’t because the Saturn V moon rocket (and related projects) were consuming over 4% of the US government’s budget, way more than even the SLS and definitely more than the Falcon Heavy.

Starship exceeds Saturn V’s lift capacity.

Not true.

Saturn V's lift to LEO was 120-140 tonnes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V) while SpaceX claims Starship's is "over" 100 tonnes (https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf).

It exceeds Saturn V on the second launch that day. ;-)

Well, if you have a 140t payload it doesn't matter how many 100t payloads you can lift per day, it just isn't going to lift it.

On the other hand, obviously, payloads are planned for the rocket they are going to be lifted by, so most likely somebody will set constraints on their project to either have smaller payload or split it into parts.

Right; I think Starship, if it pans out, is going to entirely change how we plan, build, and carry out space missions, both manned and unmanned.

It's also possible whoever has such a large payload might want their own second stage & a fairing, instead of Starship. A single-use stage (no reserve fuel) with no re-entry needs could be a lot lighter than Starship, though vastly more expensive. That might be worth it for some payloads. Super Heavy is planned to be a ridiculously powerful booster.

I doubt that will happen though. It's far more likely in-orbit assembly and orbital refueling will progress dramatically as launch costs drop, and anyone with such a payload would find a way to design it for such assembly.

Don’t final inspections with payload attached by itself take more than a day? Or is that going to be a relic of the past?

I doubt anyone knows for sure at this point, but I'd imagine the goal is something more akin to loading cargo into the belly of an airliner; consistently sized modules with standardized attachments for power etc.

Even given a few weeks, the relaunch of an Saturn V will be a bit rough.

Starship brings any 100 tonnes to orbit, while of Saturn V's 120+ tons a half constitutes the 3rd stage with unspent fuel. So it's less of payload per ce for Saturn V compared to Starship.

On the other hand, Starship didn't fly to orbit yet. We'll see better how it goes when it does. And we can't fly Saturn V now anyway. And Starship - even if supposedly with lower payload - promises to be much cheaper. And...

In Skylab mode it was pure payload.

Which weighted less than 80 tons - much less than what other superheavy rockets are bringing to LEO - Energiya, SLS, BFR...

That’s looking at a single launch and neglecting the refuel ability.

And will be able to refuel in orbit

We don't have the infrastructure to build them anymore, and a lot of the design wasn't captured in the blueprints because things were tweaked by hand to make them work. We could build something with Saturn V-like performance, but it would be a new rocket, not just resuming production of the older line.

That was seriously considered. It was rejected because schematics consist only a small portion of the knowledge necessary to build a rocket, most of the rest had been lost to time.

A massive amount of redesign was required to build the shuttle derived SLS, deriving from Saturn would have been worse.

But the real reason was that deriving from Shuttle kept those employees employed. SLS has never been a rocket program, it's always been a pork program.

SpaceX's Starship has twice the thrust of Saturn, so could be tweaked to send more payload by sacrificing reusability. But they have an even better plan -- refueling allows massive payloads.

In particular, all Saturn V engines were completely hand-built and the process was not documented. A lot of very fine craftsmanship went into that that we can't replicate today.

Seems like that situation where the first engineer builds an inscrutably clever codebase. Lots of fine craftsmanship indeed.

Nitpick: we can replicate it, it's not like we've technologically regressed. We're just not willing to spend the money - at it's peak NASA's budget was ~4.5% of federal spending when the Saturn V was designed (it's now only 0.5%).

> Nitpick: we can replicate it, it's not like we've technologically regressed.

Saturn's materials and computer technology are more than 50 years old. Not only would we have to want to recreate this historic technology, we would have to recreate the knowledge, skills and competencies of the experienced craftsmen that used it, across the massive supply chain, as well as the tooling required.

Actually, you’d be surprised how many techniques have been lost. They’re just not relevant, for example the actual practice of riveting battleship hulls is gone, but that changes suddenly when you want to replicate the past.

That’s because federal spending has increased across the board. NASA’s funding isn’t that much different now than then.

NASA's spending was near $5 billion in the mid 1960s. [1]

That's equal to $42 billion today per the BLS. NASA's fiscal 2021 budget is $23.2 billion. So while you're correct that Federal spending has increased as a share of the economy (declining NASA's share of spending even faster), NASA's funding is realistically down by at least half now vs then when you adjust for inflation.

That BLS figure is also the questionable official conservative take. Gold was $35 / ounce back then, it's around $1,800 now (51 fold increase). The average new car was near $3,000 in the mid 1960s, it's now $41,000. Oil was $3 / barrel in the mid 1960s, it's in the $70s now.

[1] https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol4/ch1.htm

- NASA's spending fell to $3 billion by 1974. Inflation adjusted that would be $17.5 billion today, so at least they're ahead of that.

So adjusted for inflation, NASA's budget is merely half what it was in the peak of the 1960's, whereas the statistic quoted makes it sound like it is 1/10th.

Cherry-picking a peak date is a bit dubious though. If you average over the duration of the Apollo program, you get a number much closer to today.

So most, maybe even all of the difference in budgetary size is due to increase in size of the rest of the federal budget.

To be fair, the GP comment said “at its peak”. They weren’t cherry picking, just following the initial thread. But your point about relative % of GDP may not be the best measure

No, we can't replicate it because there is simply not enough description. For example, there aren't even specs for parts.

The entire thing would have to be re-designed from scratch with modern manufacturing process in mind.

And for things like F1 engine the available manufacturing methods have a lot of influence on the design, so the result will be basically a different engine than F1.

My dad was in the airline industry. Engineers kept lots of secret techniques to prevent them from being replaced.

One had to due with adding strings to some foam mixture to get it to set correctly. Not documented anywhere. When cheap labor was brought in they couldn’t reproduce the work. So old people had to be hired back at a lot more

Rocketdyne proposed an updated F-1, the F-1B, as part of the SLS Advanced Booster Competition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50339.0

Obviously it is not exactly the same as the F-1, it is rebuilt using modern parts and manufacturing techniques. But the F-1B aimed to have at least as good performance as the F-1. It appears the proposal was not successful in convincing NASA to adopt it for an SLS liquid rocket booster, and NASA is currently planning on sticking with solids even into SLS Block 2. (And Block 2 SLS is probably never going to fly.) But Rocketdyne owns the IP to F1B and could resurrect it again in the future if there was a demand for such an engine. They were working on it within the last 10 years so unlikely that much knowledge has been lost.

This serves as a counterexample to the often repeated claim that we can't rebuild the F-1 because we've forgotten how. Rocketdyne and NASA had enough institutional knowledge to design a modern successor.

Do you have a source on that? There was an industry I was adjacent to, losing all their skilled metal workers to retirement, and there was no next generation who were skilled enough to do the machining. They were literally filming them working in the hope they could at least train someone down the road.

We can’t make them the way they used to make them, but likely could do at least as good fairly easily _if_ sufficient funds were made available.

I’m basing that on https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the..., which tells me we now know quite well how these engines (or rather: the particular one they looked at) were constructed. I also get the impression we could create those parts using other means such as 3D printing.

Nobody says we can't build an engine like F1. We just can't build F1, because we don't know how the original ones were built.

Machines like that are designed with the manufacturing process in mind.

An engine designed to be manufactured with today's manufacturing processes will look different than an engine designed to be manufactured manually by ultra-skilled metalworkers and welders.

I would like to read more about this. Is there a source or anything?

Sure. Not a source but still interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0 (Why Can't we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?)

TLDR: everything was handcrafted, notes were not made or lost, people have retired or passed away and today's engineers don't know the tricks that the original engineers used. Effectively, existing blueprints are not enough to rebuild the engine.

It's sort of like how a new cook can follow a recipe from an expert chef but the final result won't taste as good. There's a lot of tacit knowledge assumed which can't necessarily be communicated in written form.

Looking at the "LEO Payload" column here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_heavy-lift_launch_vehicl...

  Saturn V: 310,000 lb
  SLS: 209,000 lb planned
  Falcon Heavy: 126,000-141,000 lb 
  Starship: 220,000–330,000 lb planned

Of course, the benefit of Starship is that it can (in theory) do that several times a day.

wasn't that the promise with the space shuttle, too?

Maybe at one point, but the final design did not allow rapid turnaround. Starship could actually do it the way is being designed. They have a good shot at pulling it off.

Realistically, what stage of testing/maturity starship need to pass so that SLS is officially cancelled?

It's irrelevant. For Congress, SLS is primarily a jobs program. They want it to continue as long as they can make up any reason to do that, regardless of the practical use.

The jobs program is the practical use - national security requires maintaining an industrial base, or at least that's the theory (don't know how valid it is).

If only there was such a project for advanced fabrication for chips maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves in the current situation.

We do, EUV LLC. was subsidized by the US govt (via DARPA) and a US industry consortium in the 90s. Lots of the tech went to European allies in I think a sale/collaboration at some point but we maintained power due to that initial seed and have used it for things like trade restrictions on the technology.

(1998) https://www.semiconductoronline.com/doc/euv-llc-enters-devel...

I will never understand why jobs programs can't also be useful. Didn't we build a lot of infrastructure that way in the 30s?

Senator Richard Shelby's retirement, for one.

If Starship works, it's going to be almost a state-change moment in the space industry. They aren't just building a single test vehicle for a demo mission, they're building factories churning out engines, rockets, GSE, building launch pads, etc. They might take a few tries to nail a first orbital launch, once that happens (and assuming no undue regulatory hurdles) their launch cadence may start picking up dramatically within 3-6 months of a success.

If eighteen months from now Starship has launched a ~dozen or more times and SLS once, I'd imagine they might wrap up SLS with Artemis 2, which should be mostly complete by then. At a total program cost of ~$24 billion for 2 flights it would be quite ... something, but it's hard to see them continuing much beyond that. They'd just figure out a way to use Crew Dragon/Starliner to get to Starship for lunar missions (assuming they're not going to want to launch/land humans on Earth on Starship for a while).

When. When Starship works

I share your optimism but I think it it is unrealistic to unquestionably assume that SpaceX will continue to succeed. The very nature of the problems that they are trying to solve is such that failure is always a possibility.

I don’t say this as a slight to SpaceX… on the contrary the risk is what makes them so exciting!

I mean, the way they succeed with Starship is failing over and over again until they don't anymore. In that sense it is (now, not before SpaceX was scaled up) solely an issue of funding: will it work before the company runs out of cash?

At this point, I imagine most every investor in Earth would be tripping over their own legs to buy SpaceX stock if they could. If they ever run low, their ability to raise more money is as sure a thing as anything in this world these days. Additionally, Starlink is going to be an absolute revenue monster very soon, even if Starship for some reason ends up taking another decade to get working.

The only way Starship fails is if SpaceX goes broke. SpaceX is not going to go broke. Therefore, Starship will eventually work, after some variable and as yet indeterminate number of prototype failures.

> If eighteen months from now Starship has launched a ~dozen or more times and SLS once, I'd imagine they might wrap up SLS with Artemis 2, which should be mostly complete by then.

Starship needs to be crew-rated by NASA before it can replace SLS+Orion. I'm sure that will happen at some point, but that point may well be after Artemis 3 has happened.

Some people propose hybrid architectures – putting Orion+ESM inside Starship, and using F9+Dragon to ferry the crew to LEO. However, I think NASA will view those hybrid architectures as even more complex, and hence riskier, than the current SLS+Orion(+Gateway)+StarshipHLS architecture. Plus, pro-SLS forces in Congress will oppose NASA doing that. Bridenstine proposed launching Orion on Falcon Heavy, and Senator Shelby's response was to ask Bridenstine for his resignation. Shelby may be gone from Congress but there are other members of Congress with the same attitude. It is harder for Congress to oppose a NASA project to crew-rate Starship because it would be less obviously directly competitive with SLS+Orion, even if the death of SLS+Orion would be its ultimate consequence.

Out of curiosity, do we know how much SpaceX has spent in total on the Starship program?

If anyone is interested there is a nice book[1] written on SpaceX's early days when they were developing Falcon 1.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac...

This is a great read, I couldn’t put it down.

Not explicitly mentioned: this saves NASA almost $2 billion, or half the cost of the actual spacecraft. The previous SLS-mandated launch was estimated to cost about $2B per launch with no guarantee that there'd be an actual rocket available. Though, the savings mean it'll take longer to get there, 3.5 years vs 5 years.

SLS is an enormous boondoggle.

People love to hate Musk, but without SpaceX and private space companies in general, we could forget about any significant progress in space activities. The price tag would be suffocating.

It is also an interesting example of "throwing money at a problem does not always buy you a better solution". People too often come to conclusion that if some system is defective (e.g. schooling), more money would automatically help. Not necessarily.

We would have seen space progress. It wouldn’t have come for the US though.

Because congress forced them to use Space shuttle components and NASA can't go to the open market and find other components. Space shuttle suppliers are fleecing NASA.

Here's an example: The SLS/Space Shuttle RS-25 engines are $125mm a piece when they could buy RD-180 engines for $25m a piece. There are 4 engines on SLS and they are expendable.

Congress is positioned between "we actually need some functional space industry whose total expenditure cannot rise to high heavens" and "it would be so nice if some government-funded jobs were created in my constituency, so let us make the supply chains as complicated as possible".

I am still positively surprised that they opened up some of the processes to competition.

It's certainly an element, but NASA's culture today would simply never tolerate the rapid explosion cycles necessary to build a reusable rocket. SLS would be 50% cheaper maybe, but they would never have built the F9, much less a Starship.

>> Though, the savings mean it'll take longer to get there, 3.5 years vs 5 years.

I thought this was no longer the case, as NASA had determined that Falcon Heavy was not going to have to travel to Venus to get a gravity boost from it first, and could go directly to Europa like SLS.

I must be impatient due to everything moving at internet speeds. The idea that this probe won't arrive until 2030, then it might identify a landing spot for an actual lander that will need to be budgeted, built, launched and travel to Europa for another decade is a little disappointing.

I understand there are huge technical challenges, vast distances but sometimes it feels like things are moving very slowly. On the other hand I watch SpaceX cycle through revisions on a crazy fast timeline and I have hope that we will have some breakthroughs in spacefaring technology sooner than expected.

I would be happy working on a grand project exploring a distance moon, contributing to humanities future knowledge, and building that future, even if it takes decades. I think it would be a life well-spent

But if the probe blew up that would really suck

Douglas Adams really sums it up:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

That quote has more to do with the physical size of space, whereas OP is primarily referring to the speed of space program development.

The issues the poster cites, like "this probe won't arrive until 2030", are in part due to the physical size of space.

Ehh... it's due to the technical challenge of getting enough fuel into space to get to Jupiter quickly without a bunch of gravity assists.

Never going to be a weekend hop, but there are definitely technical advances that make it a 3 month trip rather than a 3 year trip.

Such as?

Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) engines for one

The former is relevant to the point when the trip itself will take half a decade.

Maybe Starship has matured enough by then to launch Europa Clipper on it? It might be able to put the probe on a much faster trajectory than Falcon Heavy could. Does anyone know of (informal?) plans regarding that?

Keep in mind that Artemis 3 [0] is scheduled to launch in september 2024 and the mission includes a moon landing with the planned Starship human landing system (HLS) [1]. Mr Maezawa's flight around Moon is also scheduled for the early 2020ies (no earlier than ("NET") 2023), so Starship is meant to be reliable enough for crewed missions then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_3#Mission

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Starship_Human...

It would be odd to change the contact that late, I would imagine. But it's an interesting possibility.

Still, Starship has a long way to go.

Starship isn’t a functional vehicle yet. It’s a long way from being able to be a launch vehicle for NASA’s most expensive payloads.

NASA tends to be extremely conservative regarding booster technology -- allowing reused boosters only after commercial customers had thoroughly proved them out, for example. Which is justifiable -- most commercial launches are communications satellites for which it's possible to insure the launch for enough to buy another, while NASA's payloads are unique and far more expensive.

The first step toward launching a melt probe and having a look at that ocean. I can't wait.

Nice.

Would we not learn a lot more by landing on these moons?

If there's a chance there's any kind of life over there, don't rush into touching it - something could potentially wipe the whole place out.

Could it?

My understanding about planetary protection is that you don't want to contaminate the new environment, because then you can't say for certain (that easily) if the life you are detecting is native to the environment or the contamination.

I also understand that the native population of the Americas suffered badly from the diseases carried in by the europeans. But those diseases landed in an environment much like the one they evolved in. The humans were humans, the atmosphere were the same, the temperature were the same, etc.

If the space-probe gets contaminated with some earthly bacteria, virus or prion they not only have to survive the travel there, but then they have to quickly adapt to the new environment. Different temperature, different chemical composition, different life forms. How often does it happen that you sneeze at a fungi and the fungi gets infected with your cold? Doing one of these adaptation alone is a big ask, doing all of them at once would be a huge leap.

Imagine that you move to a new place. You move there in a salted barrel, not designed for human occupancy. The locals speak a different language, have different customs, you can't get food you are used to and the climate is way out of your comfort zone. Would you be outcompeting the locals quick? I don't think so.

I wouldn't worry about wiping out a whole ecosystem unless the ecosystem is much much more similar to our own's.

But of course being cautious is always a good idea. Furthermore I already think we should avoid contamination. If for no other reasons than to avoid arguments about what the detected life really means.

IIRC all stuff we send into space going to other planets is sanitized here via gamma radiation so we don't contaminate other planets.

Who knows, maybe the life started on Earth as contamination from foreign objects from space.

AFAIK Jovian radiation is very strong and our current machines have hard time surviving in proximity of the planet for any significant time. Even Clipper will stay a healthy distance away most of the time and only visit the inner Jovian system shortly.

It is low enough for manned expeditions according to SpaceX concepts: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/10/spacex-its-rocket-coul...

According to Elon, radiation on a trip to mars isn't a big issue either.

Maybe, but slowing down enough to land is the problem.

To convert from a flyby to landing, you need to burn a lot of fuel, to slow down. To get that fuel to the destination, you need to bring it with you. Which means a much higher take off mass, which needs an even bigger rocket.

Mars has a very light atmosphere, which lets us aerobrake- slow down by hitting the atmosphere, that way you don't need any extra fuel. Europa's atmosphere is basically non-existent.

In theory a spacecraft could partially aerobrake in Jupiter's atmosphere to save fuel. Then use a rocket to enter Europa's orbit.

The problem is the intense radiation emitted by Jupiter, I think.

And unlike Saturn, none of the other moons of Jupiter have a significant atmosphere that could be used unfortunately.

Thanks for the explanation. I hadn't considered the fuel to slow down for a landing.

> Would we not learn a lot more by landing on these moons?

Probably, but it's also a lot harder. Not only does it require more delta-V, you now need to design, build and test a lander in addition to a spacecraft, and you need to build everything to be able to operate in Jupiter's harsh radiation environment (Europa Clipper will only do fly-bys of Europa and spend most of its orbit further away from the high radiation environment).

There are so many science fiction stories about exploring and colonizing Jovian moons. But somehow the authors always gloss over the radiation issue. Unshielded humans would probably be dead in a matter of days.

We might, and we are (just not Jupiter's moons)! The Dragonfly mission (https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu), will launch in 2027 and arrive at Saturn's moon Titan in 2036.

Dragonfly is a nuclear powered octo-copter, that will fly autonomously on the moon. Titan's small gravitational field and dense atmosphere (about 1.45x Earth's atmospheric pressure) make it one of the best places in the Solar System for flight. The general flight plan is to charge up batteries with the MMRTG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_radioisotope_the...), take off, scout a new potential landing area, land in a previously scouted landing area. On one battery charge, it will be able to fly up to 10km, and stay aloft for up to 30 minutes. Dragonfly will carry out scientific sampling both on the ground and in the air.

To quote Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(spacecraft)) about why Titan is an interesting spot for science:

> Titan is similar to the very early Earth, and can provide clues to how life may have arisen on Earth. In 2005, the European Space Agency's Huygens lander acquired some atmospheric and surface measurements on Titan, detecting tholins,[29] which are a mix of various types of hydrocarbons (organic compounds) in the atmosphere and on the surface.[30][31] Because Titan's atmosphere obscures the surface at many wavelengths, the specific compositions of solid hydrocarbon materials on Titan's surface remain essentially unknown.[32] Measuring the compositions of materials in different geologic settings will reveal how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide known key ingredients for life, such as pyrimidines (bases used to encode information in DNA) and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.[33]

> Areas of particular interest are sites where extraterrestrial liquid water in impact melt or potential cryovolcanic flows may have interacted with the abundant organic compounds. Dragonfly will provide the capability to explore diverse locations to characterize the habitability of Titan's environment, investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and search for biosignatures indicative of life based on water as solvent and even hypothetical types of biochemistry.[6]

> The atmosphere contains plentiful nitrogen and methane, and strong evidence indicates that liquid methane exists on the surface. Evidence also indicates the presence of liquid water and ammonia under the surface, which may be delivered to the surface by cryovolcanic activity.

There's a perfectly good Saturn V rocket sitting right now at the Rocket Park, NASA Johnson Space Center.

Why didn't they just use that?

What a waste of money.

https://spacecenter.org/exhibits-and-experiences/nasa-tram-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aAxALzVJYo

People who mention savings are incorrect. They should talk about reduced loss.

This mission is a total financial loss until proved otherwise.

As of today the only people who managed to make money in space are the brokers and lawyers who negotiated private tourism trips to the ISS in the 90s and again this new wave of space tourism.

There's an irrational exhuberance about space in my opinion

Not everything in life is nor should be about financial gain.

Humans are drawn to the unknown. This desire is how we have dominated a planet. Regardless of the risk there will always be someone willing to go for the sole purpose of being first. Embrace the irrational exhuberance. It is how we got to where we are now. It is how we advance into the future. Even if we fail to become a spacefaring species we will learn many new things in the endeavour.

LMAO. You're using internet technology to post this message and you consider a space mission as "waste". A space mission pones a lot of problems, from communication to logistic management. A few of the problems they had in the past with the first space missions were resolved, and technologies were ported to Earth and everyday life.

What is there for us on Jupiter? Nothing.

The progress which matters always happens in some guy's brain. Imaginary journeys, not real ones.

Einstein didn't need to travel around massive objects to come up with relativity.

The cost of that theory was basically the rent, food and water for him.

Me buying a taco is a 100% loss. Tires for my car? 100% loss. Maybe the toothpaste has residual gains if forgone dentistry expenditures. But my Netflix bill is definitely a 100% loss.

Sending another mission to Jupiter though will likely result in serious returns on investments, even if they are non-obvious at this point.

What do you consider a loss? It's not like they're setting money on fire.

Usable knowledge to improve quality of life.

And no, hope and hype about Europa being able to sustain life is not quality of life. It's a sugar high you get when you read the news or see the anchor losing it on tv.

and why should everything be about quality of life? It is an important point, but not the only one.

Edit: Also, I think the problem is not of we having 'less' quality of life (although it can still be improved), it is more of how can we distribute that better quality of life to everyone.

> and why should everything be about quality of life? It is an important point, but not the only one.

Because quality of life gets everybody on board. This sort of expeditions are paid for with the money of people who don't agree with the spending.

These people are generally talked some sense into when they disagree with military spending, or infrastructure spending or entitlements spending. The theme is always "even if you don't benefit from it yourself, people around you do and so over time will you!"

A leftist version of trickle down, I call it trickle up or trickle laterally. I can see the point in having a discussion.

The talk doesn't even happen with space, it seems like if you are for containing space spending you hate America or something

We have evidence of scientific and engineering advancements spreading from space programs out to the world. We also have evidence of trickle down economics not working. What more do you want?

(The biggest difference to explain that, I would say, is that a scientific/engineering advancement can deliver value magnitudes greater than development cost, but trickle down at best transfers some of the money. And that's what most of the budget is going into on a project like this, not basic equipment assembly or the proportionally tiny fuel cost.)

> The biggest difference to explain that, I would say, is that a scientific/engineering advancement can deliver value magnitudes greater than development cost

Nothing fungible will come out of this Jupiter mission and you know it.

If this was education budget or brain research I'd totally be onboard with it.

Ew, don't tell me what I 'know'.

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