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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.
#Trumps are putting their names behind a new #crypto #project,
one promoted Monday night in a meandering two-hour livestream on the social media site X that was remarkably light on detail.
Why it matters:
Donald Trump seems to be leveraging attention from his White House run
to promote a new business venture
— one that by its nature could spark calls of constitutional conflicts.
Trump, who teased the announcement of World Liberty Financial to his over 90 million followers on X, spoke during a hosted Q&A to start the stream.
He spoke broadly about the blockchain industry, the success of his NFT collections and crypto's generational learning curve.
He didn't personally speak about the project he is launching before turning the stream over to his sons and partners.
The platform is reportedly being described as a decentralized finance ( #DeFi ) money market,
or a platform where people can borrow, lend and earn interest on crypto.
DeFi differs from traditional finance in that it doesn't include anyone in the middle to facilitate transactions.
Everything is done on a blockchain, governed by smart contracts created by the project.
Today, there is already roughly $44 billion in crypto posted to back DeFi loans globally.
How it works:
The only thing the project team spoke to specifically Monday night was the fact that the project will launch a new cryptocurrency — sort of.
It will create a so-called #governance #token,
called #WLFI,
which will not be transferable and will not earn yield.
It can only be used to vote on changes for the project.
63% of the supply will be sold to accredited public investors,
with no pre-sales or VC allocation, project partner Chase Herro said.
Another 17% will be set aside for rewards,
while the remaining 20% will be held by the project team for compensation.
💭 My thought bubble: It's unclear why anyone would buy a token if it's non-transferrable.
What's the point of it? That's the question everyone in crypto is likely to be asking.
Zoom in:
Herro and Zachary Folkman, who is also reportedly listed on World Liberty Financial's white paper,
were reportedly behind a similar sounding effort that only lasted a few months, #Dough #Finance.
Dough was brought down by a hackthat took basically all the funds deposited into it.
The big picture:
Trump is billing "World Liberty Financial" as a chance to "Make Finance Great Again."
Banking "has become politicized," Donald Trump, Jr. said Monday night after his father signed off.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) "takes that political component out of it."
But for the Trumps, according to Bloomberg, it's nothing more than an endorsement deal.
Either way, one burning question is whether a sitting president could even be associated with such a business.
DeFi, by its nature, is permissionless.
There's no identity checks at the doors for users.
As one DeFi advocate said at a congressional hearing recently, "That is the epitome of financial inclusion."
🆘 But that also means there's nothing to prevent foreign governments from using it heavily in hopes of currying favor with a Trump administration,
which raises questions about the Constitution's Emoluments Clause.
"The constitutional problem is the President cannot take an emolument (money or things of value) from a foreign government without permission from Congress,"
Stetson Law Professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy tells Axios.
So if profits from the project came from constitutionally prohibited sources, she says, it raises the same issue. If they ever reach Trump.
However, she also noted that the courts punted on these issues in his first term.
The intrigue:
Trump's embrace of crypto has been extremely well receivedby the blockchain industry.
But this DeFi side hustle has not been.
Celebrities who become enamored with cryptocurrency and try to become entrepreneurs tend to end up losing money for their unsophisticated fans.
What we're watching:
The optics of a presidential candidate launching a new company could make cryptocurrency policy an election issue after all.