I thought I would follow up on an earlier post of mine.

A news story today reports that CNES has finally seen the writing on the wall and pulled out of NetLander. CNES's pullout is likely the death knell, and will further erode confidence in U.S. - European "collaboration." However, it'll be interesting to see whether Finland and/or Belgium, both with considerable (and largely unrealized) roles in NetLander, will try to save the mission or a derivative in some manner.

At any rate, this gives the U.S. a perfect excuse to bail out of Bruce Banerdt's NASA-funded Discovery mission of opportunity that would have flown on NetLander. A true shame.