The objective of acquiring huge amounts of wealth is not to spend it. It's to invest the money to acquire even greater wealth....and it just sort of continues in that cycle indefinitely.

However there are some exceptions - the ridiculously wealthy (Gates, Allen & Soros nowadays, Tate, Carnegie, Guggenheim & Rockefeller in days of yore) sometimes seem to need to do something as a way for them to make a more permanent mark for themselves since they have clearly gotten all the high scores in the money game.

What's really depressing about that story is that the difficulties of space science funding as a whole have already started encouraging rival researchers to start attacking each other's goals -- in this case, Lunine is using Europa Orbiter's troubles as an excuse to push money for Titan instead. Space scientists, in short, have now hit that stage in the "Raft of the Medusa" story where the cannibalism started.

In case anyone missed Bruce's artistic allusion, he is referrring to Theodore Géricault's 1819 painting "The Raft of the Medusa," Oil on canvas, 491 x 716 cm, which is hanging in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Of course, Bruce probably recalls that I used this painting for a similar analogy in another group

I've thought for some time that some of these companies were missing an opportunity. Consider the advertising potential in being able claim something like "The Microsoft/Intel Titan Rover is running Windows Vista on an Intel Itanium-based platform. If it can handle the outer reaches of the solar system, think what it can do for your desktop."

Alex and Bruce:

It is a joy - nay, an unmitigated pleasure - to have two such unassuming aesthetes acting as beacon-carriers in the Stygian darkness of the uncultured, indeed eldritch, darkness of the sadly ill-informed members of UMSF! We are not worthy! We are not worthy! We are not worthy!



Er...

...'Out of Memory', 'File not found', Viruses, oooh, I could go on! It's funny, but when there was that first post-landing difficulty all those years ago, my immediate worry was that the word 'Microsoft' was painted on the side of the MER WEB - possibly below the Lego robotic arm...

Bob Shaw

A little backstory. These artistic allusions arose 2.5 years ago in my Yahoo! Group (planetary_sciences) where I used paintings as descriptors for another discussion group, one reknowned for its "interesting" membership, though one which "shall remain nameless to protect the innocent." Bruce revived them here, no doubt due to some residual memory of my "wittiness."

The title of that thread I initiated was "Did Hieronymous Bosch foresee [discussion group name deleted]?" and the message I wrote was


In a follow up message, I posted:

Alex:

An eclectic milieu? Try slaying that with falshe teethsh!

Bob Shaw

I'll go along with that. But, actually, I DON'T remember Alex using that analogy before. I came up with it All On My Own. (Given the current space science situation, however, it would be difficult NOT to think of it. Bloodthirsty mobs at science conferences aren't all that common, at least at the ones I've attended.)

Gee, why am I not surprised at that, Bruce? I guess every witticism or every good idea MUST have originated with you. I should start calling you the Milton Berle of space discussion groups. You only steal from the best.


EDIT

Note for the planetary_sciences alumni here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/planetary_sc...es/message/9538 (Alex)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/planetary_sc...es/message/9551 (ectoterrestrial)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/planetary_sc...es/message/9552 (Alex)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/planetary_sc...es/message/9565 (Bruce)

No, I'm just clever enough to come up with all of them independently. I just never get credit for any of them. (The eerie thing is that this actually did start being true in the late 1980s: I'd come up with joke after joke, tell it to my family, and then see somebody else come up with it independently elsewhere a few months later. In the case of the Raft of the Medusa, however -- although I can't read those blog entries Alex listed -- I'm willing to accept that I was working off a subconscious memory. All I can say is that it wasn't a conscious one.)

This is a bit reminiscent of Red Skelton, who was universally detested by his writers on his TV show. Once he was asked during an interview how he came up with all those clever jokes and replied, "God puts them into my mouth." The next week his writers handed him 40 blank pages of paper and told him to have God write his script for him. In my case God frequently DOES put them into my mouth; He just also makes sure I never get credit for any of them.

Ah, now we're making progress Actually, I was just needling you, Bruce. No surprise there. I did, however, remember the "Raft of the Medusa"-series of posts from planetary_sciences from two and a half years ago, and I thought it was, say, syncrhonicity at work when you echoed it here.

At least one multimillionaire Elon Musk is betting his own money that he can create a privately financed launch system:

SpaceX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

The SpaceX Dragon: America's First Privately Financed Manned Orbital Spacecraft?
Keith Cowing
Monday, March 6, 2006
"The spacecraft grew out of initial plans SpaceX Founder Elon Musk had for carrying humans into space. Those plans, in turn, emerged from an even earlier interest first voiced some 5 years or so ago, when Musk initially considered mounting his own space mission - sending a very small, robotic probe to Mars.
"As Musk became more familiar with the realities (and frustrations) of buying spacecraft and launch vehicles, he soon became convinced that the best way to achieve his own vision was to build his own hardware."
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1095

If he succeeds, I think there will be other individuals willing to invest their own money in launch systems. Then I believe you would have those willing to finance purely scientific space missions.

The first launch of the unmanned prototype vehicle Falcon 1 is scheduled for Thursday:

http://www.spacex.com/updates.php



Bob Clark

This is wildly off the subject; but if you want to see an example of REAL egomania, take a look at the New Republic's recent note on the "extremely creepy thriller" Bill O'Reilly wrote in 1998 -- in which unspeakable things happen to all the people who said rude things to O'Reilly during his brief sojourn at CBS: http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=11465 . At least you can trust ME around sharp objects.

I just got a reply from Ralph Lorenz to several questions. Unfortunately, he had nothing useful to say on the questions about Titan's puzzling apparent surface composition, so I've put out feelers to Hasso Niemann and Sylvain Doute on that (with no replies yet). However, he DID have some comments on possible techniques for exploring Titan within a New Frontiers cost cap.

He takes a dim view of the idea of dispatching a stationary lander, by itself, to try to touch down on a possible site of ammonia-water volcanism as located by Cassini, to look for water-modified organics: "I don't think that is as appealing as [your] balloon [idea] below. Titan is obviously very diverse; there would be a lot of scientific risk in aiming at only one spot, and technical risk in doing so armed only with Cassini observations at 500 meters/pixel."

But I also suggested a nonlanding balloon (by itself) at low altitude -- equipped with cameras, meteorological instruments, and maybe other instruments such as a subsurface radar sounder or a near-IR spectrometer (possibly with multicolored lasers to illuminate the surface in the spectral bands of various interesting substances that aren't illuminated by the spectral bands of the sunlight punching through Titan's atmosphere), "to provide the kind of very detailed aerial survey of Titan's surface processes which it now seems absolutely clear we badly need in order to understand just what is happening on this complex world?"

He responds: "That sort of mission is one I have a lot of enthusiasm for. The challenge would be achieving a worthwhile data return with direct-to-Earth communications." He's right about that. Assuming it landed some time around 2020-25, once it wandered outside the north polar region it would be out of contact. (This is also a problem for the proposed windblown Titan Organics Explorer multiple-landing aerobot -- although it could probably provide an adequate science haul just by making multiple landings in the north polar region).

He adds, "An orbiter to generate global maps with topography would be another attractive mission, by itself (under the NF cap?) or as an adjunct to a balloon mission (for which it could act as a relay)." The first, of course, is the idea Emily mentioned in her blog on the LPSC conference -- but when you add a balloon or lander to it, it would almost certainly jump beyond the NF cost cap. So, the next question: is there any conceivable way to add a small com relay craft -- orbiting either Titan or Saturn itself -- to a nonlanding balloon mission while staying inside the NF cost cap? Could the Europeans provide one, with either an RTG or solar power source (as they have proposed providing one to orbit Jupiter to help Europa Orbiter)?

At any rate, just as in looking for actual biological or prebiotic evidence on Mars or Europa, we must remember Gollum's sage advice: "Cautiouss, my Preciouss! More haste, less speed!" We are simply going to have to patiently accustom ourselves to a necessarily long, drawn-out search process -- VERY drawn-out in the case of Europa and Titan.

If I remember my history correctly, when Cassini was still a pure Mariner Mark II spacecraft set for launch via OTV, it consisted of *multiple* Titan probes that were later descoped and combined to form Huygens.

Are any of the blueprints for these original Titan probes worth dusting off? Perhaps a couple of them could be launched in tandem for under 800 mill.

Your memory is, unfortunately, in error enough to be irrelevant on this. The very first plan for Cassini -- back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US was considering flying it alone -- differed from the current version only in also carrying a Saturn entry probe, which (like the Galileo entry probe) would have been dropped off just prior to Saturn orbital insertion. In fact, the mission was called "Saturn Orbiter with Two Probes" (SO2P), and I have a detailed record of a planning workshop for it that occurred all the way back in 1979, before ANY spacecraft visits to Saturn. By the time the US got around to designing it in Mariner Mark 2 form, the Saturn entry probe had already been removed for cost reasons, and the Titan probe had been handed over to the ESA.

I think I was thinking of The Ride Report's version of Cassini, which had three probes.

http://history.nasa.gov/riderep/leadinit.htm#explore

Perhaps most incredible in re-reading this report is the fact that Cassini not only launched in a form very much like the one outlined for it twenty-odd years ago, but it launched a year earlier! How many probes can claim that, I wonder.

Perhaps not - if there is a sea change in the public mood. I think Titan deserves a permanent orbiting observatory to monitor processes on decadal time scales and upward, as well as shorter probe missions to the atmosphere and surface. My hope is that the partial revelations about Titan which will flow from Cassini could just fire the imagination of enough people across the world to cut the gordian knot of NASA budget caps and spur a truly international effort with a momentum of its own. This need not pose any threat to other proposed missions: quite the contrary. A any net gain in public enthusiasm for exploration of the outer solar system is a gain for all concerned and Titan has by far the greatest potential to act as a catalyst for this process.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, here, ngunn, but what in the world makes you think that a frozen ball like Titan, where people will almost definitely *never* travel themselves, will excite the imaginations of the general populace? If Mars, which is in almost all respects more Earth-like (at least you can see the Sun and stars from there), hasn't done it to the extent that we're ever likely to send people there, then why should a place where water is rock and propane is water be all that interesting?

I tihnk you're doing something we're all a little guilty of, here -- projecting your own extreme interest onto a populace that could simply care less...

-the other Doug

Maybe you're right about the projected enthusiasm. Time will tell if I'm being too optimistic.

However I take issue with your Mars/Titan comparison. You assume that in-the-flesh accessability is a decisive factor in making a place interesting. That would make our own Moon more interesting than the entire outer solar system, not to mention the countless extra-solar planets we are just starting to observe, and which definitely do excite the public imagination.

I am proposing that Titan be kept under observation much as we maintain scientific bases in Antarctica and unmanned weather stations on mountains tops - not with colonisation or exploitation of these places in mind. As for Mars, this has more or less been achieved already. It's hard to imagine Mars being left with no orbiting observatories in the foreseeable future. And as we know thanks to those fantastic rovers there are already people who 'live' there . . .

Well, the Outer Planets Assessment Group last year reached a definite conclusion that Europa Orbiter was higher-priority than a follow-up Titan mission. There are three things I can think of that might change that ranking at this point:

(1) The possibility -- and it IS only a possibility -- that we might be able to design a desirable combined Titan-Enceladus mission;

(2) Cassini's apparent discovery that water/ammonia cryovolcanism is more extensive on Titan than had been thought, which would raise the odds that landers might find complex prebiotic molecules in its surface ice (and -- as an extremely long shot which, however, really is under consideration -- that such surface cryovolcanic ice flows might contain frozen microbes from Titan's subsurface ocean);

(3) The possibility that we'll only be able to get enough funds for a New Frontiers-class mission to any of those three worlds in the next decade -- in which case we'll need to carefully compare how much could be done at each of those three worlds with an NF mission, as opposed to a Flagship-class one.