We will finally go to the most interesting but unexplored frontier of the solar system

The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was bold in other ways, such as using a lander component to directly sample Europa’s ice. Unfortunately, the mission has become very expensive, with its budget exceeding $20 billion. When O’Keefe was replaced in 2005 by a new administrator, Mike Griffin, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter spacecraft was put on ice.

Galileo aroused an incredible amount of interest in Europe. First, NASA tried to do a fast and cheap mission. The agency then worked on the most ambitious spacecraft concept ever. They both failed. A decade has been wasted.

A new hero appears

In 2000, a conservative Texas lawyer named John Culberson won election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time. For a time, he focused on local issues, such as highway construction in the greater Houston area. However, after the Jupiter Ice Moons spacecraft was cancelled, he was angry.

Most people in Congress, as much as they care about NASA, do so for narrow interests and local jobs. For Culberson, that meant the Johnson Space Center, which was located next door. But Culberson was also deeply interested in planetary exploration, and wanted to be associated with NASA’s first mission to find life on another world. So he became an advocate for funding a NASA center on the other side of the country, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led the agency’s robotic exploration efforts.

As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Culberson began allocating funding to NASA’s budget for the ongoing study of the Europa Orbiter.

During this period, as a science correspondent for Houston ChronicleI started meeting Culberson at various events around town. He has been a conservative Christian politician and science geek all his life. I’m skeptical about that, as I wondered if his interest in science was an attempt to curry favor with voters, given that the Houston area has a large biomedical community. However, in the end, I began to realize that it was completely real. He is fascinated by the solar system and wants to know more about its origin and whether it harbors life on worlds other than Earth. We were bound by this mutual interest.