Word: spacecrafts
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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...
...build, and its Sojourner rover only $25 million. The Global Surveyor orbiter, set to join them at Mars in the fall, carried a price tag of just $152 million. Other ships being developed have had their prices slashed similarly. On the whole, the average cost of a single unmanned spacecraft has plunged from $590 million between 1990 and '94 to $190 million today, and Goldin hopes to get even that pennywise figure down to only $77 million after the turn of the decade. "Because the spacecraft cost less," he says, "we do them faster and we have more in number...
...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 picks up the telltale echoes of liquid, another spacecraft would be sent to land on Europa. Once there it would release a small cylindrical probe with...
Still another spacecraft might be launched to fly by Europa and drop a 20-lb. sphere onto its surface. Striking the frozen crust with the force of a suitcase full of TNT, the cosmic cannonball would release a mushroom cloud of ice particles into space; the mother ship would then fly through the crystalline mist, collect a bit of it and carry it back to Earth for analysis...
...budget NASA programs, the Vikings cost nearly $3 billion (measured in 1997 dollars) and were as ambitious and customized as Pathfinder is spare and off the shelf. NASA's old principle of superredundancy is reflected in the fact that there was not one but two Viking spacecraft, the second an exact replica of the first...