Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

If You Love Voyager, Like I Love Voyager

The New York Times has a remarkable article about the Voyager probe team. A number of people who prepared the mission or become involved as it approached the outer planets still log hours every day!

I’m an unabashed fan of the Voyager team and the probes they made, which have overperformed mission life and expectations by orders of magnitude. Over the years, I’ve written several articles about the history of the spacecraft and the state of the mission. I had the fortune to interview Ed Stone a few years back, and get his insight, plus some follow-up interviews and emails for later articles. Sounds like he’s as crystal sharp now as he was then.

“Postcards from the Edge” (the Economist): An interview with Ed Stone about the mission.
“In Praise of Celestial Mechanics” (the Economist): How NASA’s remote hands on Voyager 1 and 2 upgraded its

Space

Space Gets Farther Away

This week's Economist features two articles by yours truly about SPACE — and humanity's shortened reach.

You see, in the 1990s, America's budgets were flush, and we funded a ton of projects to send probes and landers and orbiters and oh my all over the place. Those missions came to fulfillment through the 2000s, and even as budget tightened, the early funding helped carry through missions that might take 10 years to plan and then several years to reach their target.

So Cassini is currently still active around Saturn, New Horizons reaches Pluto next month, and Juno orbits satellite in 2016. But nearly all current NASA missions outside of Mars start winding down after that. And then nothing heads out very ambitiously until the early 2020s, when the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA separately send missions to Jupiter, arriving by 2030, under current plans.