After already rising from the ashes several times over the last ten years, the New Horizons mission to the only planet not yet visited by a spacecraft could be delayed — and therefore scrubbed for another century or so — because of an unexplained budget cut proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives. "Without any warning, out of the blue the House made this budget cut of almost half our budget," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. Ironically, it was only in April that NASA finally gave New Horizons the green light to start "cutting metal" to build the spacecraft. The $55 million cut out of a $130 million budget has the planetary scientists particularly upset because it would mean a delay in the January 2006 launch. That means missing critical alignments in the orbits of not only Pluto but Jupiter as well, Stern explained. As the mission is now planned, New Horizons first travels to Jupiter, and slingshots around it to speed its travel to Pluto. That boost would save fuel and three years of travel time. A delayed launch, on the other hand, would miss Jupiter and gobble up the fuel that was expected to send the spacecraft beyond Pluto and into the Kuiper Belt — the outer solar system asteroid belt of which Pluto is the largest member. What's more, the longer length of the mission would boost the overall cost of running the mission. That's a bad deal, according to an editorial entitled "Planets don't wait for budget catch ups" in the October 6 Aviation Week & Space Technology.
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