Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...covering the sphere can get pricey. In 1993, before NASA's Mars Observer spacecraft had even entered orbit around the planet, it blew an aneurysm in a fuel line and spun off into the void, taking nearly $1 billion of NASA funding with it. The twin Viking spacecraft, which accomplished their missions successfully, landing on Mars in 1976, nonetheless set taxpayers back about $3 billion...
When Goldin took over NASA in 1992, he knew that in deficit-conscious times, this kind of trust-fund spending could not continue. From now on, he decreed, the luxury ships of the past would be scrapped. In their place would be stripped-down spacecraft built essentially from available, off-the-shelf parts. What's more, the new ships would not contain a whole science lab's worth of instruments and experiments, but just a handful--generally the ones the scientists deemed absolutely essential to make the trip worthwhile...
...Pathfinder and Surveyor will be claiming the attention of Mars scientists for the immediate future, there's a small fleet of similar ships poised to fly. Every 26 months the orbital minuet that Earth and Mars dance around the sun brings them close enough to make interplanetary travel practical. NASA plans to take advantage of those exploratory windows, sending at least three other lander-orbiter pairs to the Red Planet in 1998, 2001 and 2003. In 2005 the agency hopes to exceed even these ambitious plans, launching the first-ever round-trip Mars ship, one capable of landing somewhere...
...over images returned by the Galileo space probe that provided evidence of a water ocean beneath a thin rind of ice on Jupiter's moon Europa. Where there's water, there's usually heat, and where there's water and heat, there could well be life. Sometime after 2000, NASA is hoping to launch a Europa probe that will orbit the Jovian moon at an altitude of 60 miles--about the same distance at which Apollo spacecraft used to orbit Earth's moon--photographing its surface and taking radar soundings to look for water beneath its crust. If the radar...
...everyone at NASA is convinced that Goldin's thrift-shop ships are up to the trips. "Faster and cheaper is not necessarily better," says Ray Newburn, a veteran astronomer with 41 years of experience working on J.P.L. missions. "It's nice to have some small missions where you don't have all your eggs in one basket. But you can't always be cheap about missions that go way out and have to last a decade or more...