Adam said:

>did you notice how he's talking about "aerocapture" as some
>sort of alternative to the nuke-ion propulsion? That's the same
>naive error I made when we discussed "2010: Odyssey II". I
>know aerocapture has been proposed for Neptune missions -
>where it would work - but Jupiter is a wholly different gravity well.

It's not that big of a gaffe. Most of the folks who know that aerocapture doesn't work for Jupiter are in the aerospace trade and don't bother telling anyone else other than aeronautical engineers.

Aerocapture is an exciting concept for Neptune. I mentioned to a collegue that nuclear electric coupled with aerocapture might be a good idea for Neptune, i.e. use the slow accelleration of ion propulsion to get to Neptune quickly and then use aerocapture to rapidly decelerate at Neptune. The collegue replied that it would be unwise to give up the nuclear reactor while in the Neptune system because the electric power could drive high bandwidth communications. My snappy comeback was: If JIMO gets canned, we could use solar electric to get to Neptune quickly and then use aerocapture.

I'm still sceptical about JIMO getting canned even though most folks in the planetary science business don't want JIMO. I'm convinced that the political support for JIMO is based upon a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with Space Exploration. This doesn't bother me too much because there is ***always*** a hidden agenda with aerospace technology (it normally involves new and exotic ways to kill lots of people). The trick is to divert the new technology towards Space Exploration and away from the other application.

Gary