<story><title>The Europa mission is real and could very well happen</title><url>http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/03/heres-why-the-europa-mission-is-real-and-could-very-well-happen/#21279101=0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bfe</author><text>I talked with a NASA engineer in 1998 who was working on the planned Europa probe, and hoping it would be funded enough to include a lander and not just a Europa orbiter. Sad to see how little progress we&amp;#x27;ve made since then, and how arbitrarily the cause advances.&lt;p&gt;Even more, it&amp;#x27;s continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA&amp;#x27;s space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don&amp;#x27;t have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.&lt;p&gt;Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Europa mission is real and could very well happen</title><url>http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/03/heres-why-the-europa-mission-is-real-and-could-very-well-happen/#21279101=0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pshin45</author><text>I feel compelled to plug the 2013 sci-fi film &amp;quot;Europa Report&amp;quot;[1], a great movie that no one watched.&lt;p&gt;Space.com called it &amp;quot;awesome&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;stunningly realistic&amp;quot;[2].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Europa_Report&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.space.com/21247-europa-report-scifi-film-trailer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.space.com&amp;#x2F;21247-europa-report-scifi-film-trailer....&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>