I was surprised to learn upon researching it that the Galileo, Juno and Cassini missions to Jupiter and Saturn did not use aerocapture. Apparently since they needed a maneuvering system anyway, additional fuel weighed less than a heat shield, an Oberth maneuver at periapsis sufficed to brake into a high elliptical orbit, and flybys of the larger moons took care of the rest. Possibly it helps that the orbital velocity of Jupiter and Saturn around the Sun is lower that far out than for an inner planet.
I want more plutonium, dammit! We could have so many cool activities with more plutonium.
There’s just barely enough Pu-238 available for a few deep space missions like Dragonfly. But we should have dozens of these. Dragonfly is a cool setup–the radioisotope unit only produces 70 watts, so it charges up the batteries for a long period so it can have a burst of flight time. And due to the gravity and atmospheric density, flight on Titan is only 1/40th as energy intensive as on Earth. So it gets more flight time than you would think. And the waste heat keeps everything warm.
But we’re holding back on too many interesting missions due to the lack of radioisotope material. Europa Clipper had to use stupidly large solar panels due to there only being 1/25 the solar flux available out there. And there is not enough progress being made on improved radioisotope generators (Stirling engines in particular) because there is so little material that they are unwilling to take risks on less-developed technology.
Supposedly, the US and Canada are increasing Pu-238 production, but I can’t tell how it’s actually going. The US target is only 1.5 kg/year. I’d prefer 10x that.
It requires only … ze vill to do so!!
My autonomous arm is making demands. You’d better listen to it.
Hearing grumblings that the incoming admin might scrap the SLS in favor of rockets built by some carmaker. Hope not.
There might be more impetus for ramping up production of power sources for outer system probes if it becomes cheaper to launch them. If you don’t have to nickel-and-dime every last gram to save weight because you have a damn big rocket to start with, then probes might be built more cheaply and launched more frequently.
SLS is the single worst project on NASA’s plate. It definitely deserves to be scrapped.
SpaceX has a very capable fleet between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, with Starship soon to be added. Blue Origin is on the verge of launching New Glenn. ULA has Vulcan. Rocket Lab has their tiny Electron but will have Neutron in a few years.
Of these, only Starship is a true replacement for SLS (being a super heavy booster), but between all of these the US has the most capable rocket fleet in the world by a wide margin, and we simply don’t need a rocket that costs 10 to 100x as much as the alternatives.
And don’t pretend that this is actually some kind of public/private thing. SLS is just a way of funnelling billions of dollars to America’s worst contractors–Boeing, Northop Grumman, and Aerojet Rocketdyne being the top beneficiaries. It is truly a pork distribution project and nothing more.
I should add…
As stupid as this comment is to begin with, what’s extra embarrassing about it is that carmakers actually have a long and distinguished history in aerospace. Chrysler built the first stage of the Saturn 1B, as well as proposed the SERV vehicle, which very likely would have been a superior alternative to the Space Shuttle. GM built the lunar rovers.
And more generally, any “built by some <seemingly unrelated industry>” argument is also doomed to fail. Space suits built by a bra maker (Playtex/ILC Dover)! Satellites built by a glass jar maker (Ball Aerospace)! And yet they did very well.
There are many islands of competence across industry and it often has little to do with their apparent area of expertise. Conversely, established players such as Boeing may draw from an infinite well of incompetence.
Not to mention the pioneering avionics firm of the 1960s: Ford Aeronutronic
These famous folks made satellites and car parts and …
There are more examples, but I’m blanking on the names from my youth.
Most British car makers got called up for war work of one sort or another. Some of them continued to make planes and engines after the war. Bristol is a good example, but the Rolls Royce of examples is probably Rolls Royce. Now a separate company to the car maker, but not for most of its history.
I should have thought of TRW. My dad actually ran a TRW auto parts warehouse when I was a kid, so the TRW=auto parts connection was very strong from an early age. So finding out later that they were big into aerospace was actually something of a shock.
Tom Mueller–engine lead at SpaceX until he retired–came from TRW. Where he (what else?) designed rocket engines. Unfortunately it was one of those situations where the government hands out development contracts for interesting next-generation technologies, which then get cancelled the moment things get interesting. So little of what he developed there went anywhere, and he joined the Reaction Research Society to launch rockets in the desert in his spare time.
One might say, in reaction to his previous job. 
I know of another.
Many excellent satellites have been built by the same guys as makes canning jars.
pssst…
It’s a good example that’s worth repeating, though.
Sherwin-Williams–makers of that gloppy latex crap you buy at Home Depot–also makes a variety of aerospace coatings. Also found at Home Depot, Honeywell makes thermostats–and a crapton of aerospace avionics.
When leaving USAF I interviewed at Ball. Who had an avionics skunkworks & wanted software devs with fighter experience. Might’ve had a completely different life if they’d said “yes.”
My ex-wife was an avionics-division engineer at Honeywell for a decade-ish.
Whole lotta aerospace in the southwest.
Good engineering skills translate anywhere. The details may be different but the principles are the same.
Another automotive example: AC Delco built the Apollo Guidance Computer. Actually it was the “AC Spark Plug Division”, which turned into AC Delco after various mergers and renamings.
That’s very kind of you. I thought I read your earlier examples well enough.
Ball was definitely one of the most “they do WHAT?” ones out there. They even used exactly the same trademark on their aerospace products and jelly jars.
I know, eh? I think I was vaguely aware of both brands in their respective industries for a while without making the connection. “Ball” is a common enough name that it could just be a coincidence. But at some point I thought something looked strangely familiar between the two logos.
Conglomerates gonna conglomerate.
The initial argument in favor of conglomeration was essentially one of portfolio diversification so the umbrella corp as a whole would have staying power over the long haul of good and bad times in different industries and deliver fairly consistent returns as a whole. Akin to a stocks + bonds + commodities + real estate + ???, etc., financial portfolio.
The mantra of shareholder value took over in the late 1970s, saying the shareholders wanted only narrowly focused companies and they would be the ones to achieve diversification by holding different company’s shares. What had been a conglomerate premium became a conglomerate handicap.
With the result that the investor class was fine, but everyone else’s safety net and long term business reliability, be they supplier or customer, management or labor, or even the factory town, were simply destroyed to increase the returns to the (professional) investor class.
How nice for them.
It’s interesting that niche players like Ball retain the conglomerate mentality, but somehow operate under the radar of “focused shareholder value”.
I guess conglomeration (if you can pull it off) solves the problem of a company’s core business becoming obsolete, in the vein of Kodak, Polaroid, etc. Just move into a different business. You have to recognize when your main business is on the downslope, though.
Then again, maybe at a national scale we want corporations to have a natural lifespan. They’re founded, they grow, they have a nice middle age, and then they decline and die. Maybe bad for the employees, but that’s what the government is for. A reset button from time to time clears out the accumulated cruft and forces adaptation.