This week, NASA doubled down on no fewer than eight of its deep space probes whose futures had been in doubt due to budgetary pressures, extending their ongoing missions by an average of three years 📝 jeffreykluger
t’s not hard to keep track of NASA’s big-ticket items—the high visibility spacecraft that generally carry equally high price tags and make very big headlines. There’s the $150 billion International Space Station; the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope; the $2.4 billion Perseverance Mars rover; and then, of course, the trouble-plagued, $4.1 billion-per-flight Space Launch System moon rocket. That’s an impressive handful for any national space agency.
But NASA is more than its marquee missions. Much less discussed by most folks is the flock of spacecraft the space agency is operating throughout the solar system at any given moment.
The missions are being extended for a range of reasons, depending on the spacecraft. In addition to the science they’re already collecting, the Mars orbiters can also serve as data relay stations for future Mars landers—uncrewed and, one day, crewed. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter can do the same for uncrewed spacecraft landing on the moon. New Horizons is going in search of potential new Kuiper Belt objects to barnstorm.
The announcement of the contract extensions for the eight overachieving ships did not make much news this week—but it should have. NASA’s budget is tiny—just 0.4% of total U.S. federal outlays—yet it parlays that to maintain nothing less than an interplanetary flight wing. The spacecraft go about their work quietly, but spectacularly. They’ve earned every additional year of life NASA’s engineers can give them.
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