Prometheus in Trouble?

Pluto Mission May Be Early Victim Of Growing Budget Crisis

Prometheus seems to be falling prey to a Congress that doesn’t know squat about the physics involved, and thinks that it can raid the line item for district pork without serious effects.

Of course, the whole plan to send JIMO and/or a Pluto probe using electric propulsion doesn’t help. By all means, develop a nuclear power source for space applications, but send it via chemical rocket so that it arrives in a reasonable amount of time.

It’s news like this that makes me worry about the marriage of space nuclear power development and electric propulsion. If electric propulsion for such applications ends up being killed off (when it should not have been proposed for this use in the first place), it could very well take down with it the much more important nuclear power portion of Prometheus.

(Interestingly, NASA seems to be realizing that a Prometheus-powered mission will require a launch vehicle bigger than any currently available, in order to loft the heavy payload to the desired long-term “safe” orbit. Hmm…I wonder where they might be able to find such a vehicle…)