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.

Backed by a cabal of wealthy conservative patrons like industrialist #David #Koch,
banker #Richard #Mellon #Scaife,
and the devout Catholic entrepreneur #Frank #Hanna,
the Federalist Society under Leo became a breeding ground for conservative judges who were recruited at law school,
groomed through the society’s program of events and talks,
and then bound together through their careers.

“The key was to figure out how to develop what I call a ‘pipeline’
— basically, where you recruit students in law school,
you get them through law school,
they come out of law school,
and then you find ways of continuing to involve them in legal policy,” Leo later explained.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for #John #Roberts
— a former member
— to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court,
the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate.

A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court
— #Harriet #Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society
— and pressured him to nominate #Samuel #Alito, one of its members, in her place.

Leo worked closely with the "Judicial Confirmation Network",
a new nonprofit organization set up using funds from #Robin #Arkley, a California businessman known as the
“foreclosure king,” who had made billions buying up mortgages of people in financial difficulties.

The idea for #JCN had been hatched at a dinner in Washington attended by Leo and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shortly after Bush’s reelection in late 2004.

JCN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on radio and online advertisement to shape public opinion.

It was run by #Neil and #Ann #Corkery, a couple who had been members of #Opus #Dei since at least the eighties.

Neil had been a critical figure in getting a new residence for male, celibate members of the Catholic movement built in Reston, Virginia.

“Opus Dei members preach their faith through their work as well as the friendships they develop,” Ann explained.

She and her husband would later preach their faith by becoming central figures in a series of nonprofits that would channel dark money for Leo’s efforts.

Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy
-- in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.

Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy:

if Donald #Trump, rightwing courts, #gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican #caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional #chaos over the certification of this presidential election, 👉two men cleared the path.

The single-minded determination of #Leonard #Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US #supreme #court and ♦️stacked lower and state courts with Republican #ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.

#Chris #Jankowski masterminded the partisan #gerrymanders that ♦️tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans,
♦️ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and ♦️rendered elections in Wisconsinand North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.

Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar.

They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.

What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice #John #Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and 💥making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Two men have re-engineered the US electoral system in favor of Republicans

If the right strews constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two people will have cleared the path

^{Guardian staff reporter (The Guardian)}