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Yeah, you read it right. There will be no mission to Ceres or Vesta.

This doesn't come as a surprise. I can almost guarantee that all of the missions that were "indefinitely postponed" will be cancelled, and that they already are cancelled for all intents and purposes.

The real pain in the assstronomy is that several of these missions, such as the Europa mission, already had congressional approval.

I'll admit that the Dawn mission was way over budget (40 million or so, I believe), and that there were technical problems holding them back, but this is still enough of a development to give me an even deeper sinking feeling in my stomach than before.

...John...

I'm really starting to hate NASA. I was looking forward to that one...

Malenfant wrote:I'm really starting to hate NASA. I was looking forward to that one...

It wouldn't be so bad if there were some other good science goals in the works. But as far as I can find, the only goal there is right now is the completion of another ISS construction phase before the shuttle is decommissioned in 2010. Nothing like feeding a white elephant....

...John...

Depressing news. As a small consolation, the ESA has an interesting asteroid mission in the pipeline called Don Quijote. Looks like it's still a long way in the future, but it's something to pin our hopes to.

http://www.esa.int/gsp/completed/neo/donquijote.html
http://www.esa.int/gsp/NEO/

Maybe ESA is the future for planetary science, not NASA?

Well, if you think that NASA has too much bureaucracy, compare it to ESA...
I've heard that mission approval procedure is much more complicated in ESA, an already accepted mission may be tossed around again... NASA has been more straightforward on this.

The success of Mars Express has been important for ESA, but it has a lot to learn before it becomes anything like NASA on planetary science.

One should not forget that ESA has budget woes too... For example, it is possible that BepiColombo the long-prepared Mercury mission may be cancelled altogether. Mars Express was based on Russian design, and Venus Express was actually built from the "scrap pieces" left from the MEX mission.

Darn it. And JAXA sucks too. This is depressing. Is it me or is Western civilization disappearing down the plughole? Time to start learning Chinese...

If it helps, the more homework that I do on the Dawn Mission, the more I become convinced that it was a losing battle. The project was already over $60 million in cost overruns, with at least 29 identified technological problems that were not close to being solved at all.

In this case, at least, the cancellation was probably a good thing. I hope they continue to work with the technology, independent of any mission, to solve these problems, and then resubmit the mission in a new incarnation.

But Dawn itself... it looks like it was another white elephant.

...John...

Daniel,

I have deleted the contents of this post.

Political statements are not welcome on the Celestia forum.

Selden