Ready, Aim, shoot own foot
Remember this? Here's your update: Those ignorant, grifting wastrels on House of Representatives' Appropriations Subcommittee nicked $55 million for projects in their home states Out of the $130 million for Solar System missions. That's 43%. This is the program Congress insisted in and funded for $105 million in FY 2003. Now that money is shot. And the cost of the delay will be about $80 million [17%]. The usual Congressional shennanigans with your money? Sure. But. . . the cost to the potential scientific knowledge to be gained is incalculable. This goes way beyond penny wise and pound foolish. Besides the loss of information about Pluto-Charon, about the formation of planets, about the formation of our Solar System; who knows what else the sensors would have seen out there."Beyond the waste of people's time and resources...there is THE TERRIBLE LOSS TO SCIENCE [emphasis theirs] entailed by waiting for years for new propulsion technologies." [outer Solar System experts William B. McKinnon and Jeff Moore ]
If we wait a year, we will miss the opportunity to utilize the gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter [because it won't be there]. If we miss that, the mission will take 4 additional years to get to Pluto. In four [Earth] years' time, Pluto will be 5% more shrouded in impenetrable darkness, its thin and amazing atmosphere will likely have frozen out onto the planet's surface which will likely interfere seriously with the spacecraft's instrument readings. Because of Pluto's eccentric orbit, it will be 120 years or more until we get another opportunity like this.
Just for a little perspective, 120 years ago: Congress authorized the first steel vessels in the US Navy; the first long distance phone service between Chicago and New York was inaugurated; buffalo Bill Cody put on his first Wild West Show; the Brooklyn Bridge opened; the first baseball game to be played under electric lights; Krakatoa exploded; Margaret Sanger was born [she didn't coin the term "birth control" for thirty more years]; Standard Time Zones were adopted in the US and Canada [standard railraod time was also instituted]; Pulitzer assumed command of the New York World and New York was run by "the 400;" Black Bart, the stagecoach robber, was caught; silver was discovered at Broken Hill, Australia; the British officered Egyptian armies in the Sudan were defeated by the Dervishes [El Mahdi]; Susan B Anthony was preparing to campaign for women's suffrage; and Charles Dana Gibson created the Gibson Girl.
120 Years Ago: a visual
Where will we be in another 120 years? Hell, how old is the Internet ?!?
Talk about shot in the foot . . .
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