NASA said Tuesday that it wants to plan a robotic mission to Jupiters watery moon Europa, where astronomers speculate there might be life. (1996 photo of Europa/AP Photo/NASA)

Whats NASA really up to? Sometimes its hard to know for sure. For a number of years NASA has developed various programs and missions that did not survive the erosional forces of constricting budgets and strategic changes. The agency has a dilemma: It takes at least a decade to do anything significant in space, but our political cycle is faster than that. Thus there are these phantom programs that exist on paper, that look like real plans, but which may never become physical, tangible realities. As a reporter covering NASA programs, you want to add a stipulation somewhere in your story that says, in effect, This may not actually happen.

Even programs where the metal has already been cut can wind up in the trash heap. The Constellation Program of Bush 43 was a major effort to return astronauts to the moon, but it never felt 100 percent real, because the plan lacked any sense of political urgency or public buy-in. It felt vulnerable to shifting winds. And such a wind came along the zephyr known as Barack Obama. Obama killed Constellation. That meant the demise of the Ares 1 rocket after it had already burned through billions of dollars. And what were they going to do with that $500 million, brand-new mobile launcher at the Cape that was designed for the Ares 1? (Answer: They can probably re-purpose it for another rocket, but space hardware is so customized that its not like adjusting the height knob on a workout machine at the gym.)

Surviving from Constellation is the Orion capsule, but where will you go with it, if not back to the moon? NASA last year proposed the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which would involve astronauts in Orion visiting a captured asteroid in lunar orbit. In the new FY2015 budget request, the Obama administration wants to boost funding for the ARM, to $133 million in 2015, but you can expect political rancor on that front. The ARM is hardly a slam dunk, in part because they havent found a target rock. Republicans dont like it because it has Obamas imprimatur, and they took the rare step last year of trying to prevent NASA from spending any money on it. The ARM has no international partners. It is not essential to the hopes and dreams and bottom lines of the huge aerospace corporations (although a captured rock would give Orion and the SLS rocket a destination in the relatively near term other than points in space or interesting orbits around the moon). So the ARM lives, but its precisely the kind of program that a subsequent Congress or Republican administration would take delight in killing.

Which finally brings up the issue of a Europa mission. Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press wrote about the Europa proposal Tuesday. (Could be fish under the ice there!) Theres $15 million in the Obama budget request for a Europa mission (heres my news article that touches on the NASA budget its mostly about the United States and Russia being roommates in space). But a Europa mission would be a Flagship class mission, meaning $1 billion-plus in cost. NASA Administrator CharlesBolden said a few months ago that the space agency couldnt afford new Flagships in the near future (other than ones already underway). Other officials confirmed that: Theres no money in the tight NASA budget for Flagships right now. Any plausible mission to Europa is definitely Flagship-class, as I reported in December in the final installment of the Destination Unknown series.

Initial estimates for a Europa orbiter put the cost at $4.7 billion. Thats expensive even by flagship-mission standards. Getting a spacecraft into orbit around Europa is tricky, because its close to Jupiter and at the bottom of the planets deep gravity well. Jupiter also emits intense radiation, and the spacecrafts instruments would need to be covered in costly lead shielding.

So engineers went to a Plan B. Rather than orbiting Europa, the spacecraft would go into an orbit around Jupiter, spending most of its time outside the planets radiation field, and then swoop in repeatedly, with 34 flybys of Europa and nine of the moon Ganymede.

At this point the Europa Clipper is just a concept under study, and it is not clear when or if it will graduate and become a real mission.

So, does NASA intend to do a Flagship-class Europa mission? What do we make of the $15 million in the budget request? Reporters on the NASA budget teleconference Tuesday pressed Bolden to clarify the issue. He didnt. Finally, NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said the Europa mission is in the early pre-formulation stage and said of the future scale of the mission, Were frankly just not sure at this point.

One likely outcome is that Congress will see the $15 million request from the administration and raise it substantially. That was suggested to me by Rep. Adam Schiff , the Democrat who represents Pasadena (home base of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and who is a big booster of the NASA planetary program.

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Is NASA really going to send a probe to Europa? [w/updates]