The NASA administrator at the time,
Sean O'Keefe,
sought to develop a new generation of spacecraft
💥powered by nuclear reactors💥 as part of what he called #Project #Prometheus.

He believed that a mission with Europa as its main target offered a perfect test case for the technology,
and thus, the "Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter"
was born.

This was a highly ambitious mission. A typical spacecraft uses on the order of a few hundred watts of power.

This probe, powered by a nuclear reactor, would have had on the order of 100,000 watts of power.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was audacious in other ways,
such as using a landing component to directly sample Europa's ice.

Unfortunately, the mission also became insanely expensive,
with a budget blasting past $20 billion.

When O'Keefe was replaced by a new administrator in 2005, Mike Griffin, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was put on ice.

Galileo sparked an incredible amount of interest in Europa.

First, NASA tried a fast, cheap mission.

Then the agency worked on the most ambitious spacecraft concept ever put forward.

Both failed. A decade was lost.

❇️ A new champion emerges

In 2000, a conservative Texas attorney named
#John #Culberson won election to the US House of Representatives for the first time.

For a time, he focused on local issues, such as freeway construction in the greater Houston area.

However, after the cancellation of the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, he was furious.

Most people in Congress, to the extent they care about NASA, do so for parochial interests and local jobs.

For Culberson, that meant Johnson Space Center, which was located in a district adjacent to his.

But Culberson was also deeply interested in planetary exploration,
and he wanted to be associated with NASA's first mission to find life on another world.

So he became an advocate of funding for a NASA center on the opposite 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 to tuck funding into NASA's budget for the ongoing study of a Europa orbiter.

During this period, as a science reporter for the Houston Chronicle,
I began to bump into Culberson at various events around town.

He was both a conservative Christian politician and a life-long science geek.

Skeptic that I am, I wondered if his interest in science was an act to ingratiate himself with constituents,
given that the Houston area has a large biomedical community.

Eventually, however, I began to realize it was totally genuine.

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 bonded over this mutual interest.

In the meantime, there were more furtive starts on a Europa mission.

In 2007, NASA began studying mission concepts for #Europa and #Ganymede in the Jovian system,
as well as the moons #Titan and #Enceladus around Saturn.

Working with international partners two years later, NASA eventually down-selected to a combination mission in which the US space agency built an orbiter for Europa
and the European Space Agency one for Ganymede

(eventually, this European mission did launch, as #JUICE, in 2023).

NASA's part was known as the Jupiter Europa Orbiter.

However, a year later, new NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was looking for ways to cut the agency's budget.

By now, you probably know what was about to happen.

Sure enough, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter's budget was ballooning to above $3 billion.

And there was another problem
—Mars became ascendant in the agency's exploration interests.

"For the first time in 20 years, #Mars was brought into competition with the outer planets," Brown said.

"The top endorsement in a painful budget environment was a Mars Sample Return. As a result, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter died."

Once again, Culberson was not happy. But this time, he would soon be in a position to do something about it.