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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 172487" data-attributes="member: 537">And nobody ever disputed that there is benefit from a Europa mission. Who is going to judge the relative benefits of these missions? You? A bunch of people who answer an opinion poll?When it comes to issues of scientific merit, there's no such thing as "all else being equal". While it's possible to rank different projects so that (for example) trying to prove pi = 24/7 is less worthy of government funding than mapping the human genome, any issue of real controversy is always going to be just that -- controversial.If both missions really do have "equal merit" (a rather nebulous claim to start with), then it really doesn't matter, from a scientific point of view, which one goes ahead. No other point of view matters. There are also issues to do with planetary orbits and timing which mean that the "window" for a useful Pluto mission is relatively small. Because of that, I don't have any problem with the Pluto mission, regardless of what polls say. We can always go to Europa later, but this is less true of Pluto.Come to think of it, how did this devolve into a Pluto-vs-Europa argument? As far as I know, NASA is committed to both projects. It's just that one is going ahead before the other; a decision that makes perfect sense in the light of the issues mentioned above.Year Zero solutions don't have much credibility as far as I'm concerned.</blockquote>