We’re finally going to the Solar System’s most intriguing but unexplored frontier

The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was audacious in other ways, such as using a landing component to directly sample Europa’s ice. Unfortunately, the mission also became insanely expensive, with a budget blasting past $20 billion. When O’Keefe was replaced by a new administrator in 2005, Mike Griffin, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was put on ice.

Galileo sparked an incredible amount of interest in Europa. First, NASA tried a fast, cheap mission. Then the agency worked on the most ambitious spacecraft concept ever put forward. Both failed. A decade was lost.

A new champion emerges

In 2000, a conservative Texas attorney named John Culberson won election to the US House of Representatives for the first time. For a time, he focused on local issues, such as freeway construction in the greater Houston area. However, after the cancellation of the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, he was furious.

Most people in Congress, to the extent they care about NASA, do so for parochial interests and local jobs. For Culberson, that meant Johnson Space Center, which was located in a district adjacent to his. But Culberson was also deeply interested in planetary exploration, and he wanted to be associated with NASA’s first mission to find life on another world. So he became an advocate of funding for a NASA center on the opposite side of the country, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led the agency’s robotic exploration efforts.

As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Culberson began to tuck funding into NASA’s budget for the ongoing study of a Europa orbiter.

During this period, as a science reporter for the Houston Chronicle, I began to bump into Culberson at various events around town. He was both a conservative Christian politician and a life-long science geek. Skeptic that I am, I wondered if his interest in science was an act to ingratiate himself with constituents, given that the Houston area has a large biomedical community. Eventually, however, I began to realize it was totally genuine. He is fascinated by the Solar System and wants to know more about its origin and whether it harbors life on worlds other than Earth. We bonded over this mutual interest.