27 June 1999

My project is cancelled. Friday noon I sat in a JPL conference room with about forty other people in somber silence to hear that our spacecraft -- the first to land on a comet -- would never be built. There's not enough money, NASA had to cut something, and we were it. Comet Tempel 1, we never got to know you and it looks like we never will, at least in this lifetime.

The project is Champollion, otherwise known as ST4 for Space Technology mission number 4. (We're the same people who brought you Pathfinder a few years ago, and scored a record number of Web hits as our spacecraft landed on Mars.) NASA had a shortfall of a hundred million dollars or so this year, induced by problems in other projects further along in development. Champollion was a virgin, ripe for sacrifice to Gods of the budget. Chop!

Why are we canceling a landing on a comet? It's hard to understand, considering the popularity that asteroids and comets have drawn in the public imagination because of movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, not to mention the asteroid collision scares that blip us on the news occasionally.

How much will it cost every man-woman-child in the country to watch the first-ever landing on one of those mysterious gasballs that we've always wondered about but never had the wherewithall to explore? Divide the population of the country, 260 million, by the price tag on the project -- roughly $260 million including postlaunch operations -- and you get a matinee rate of about one dollar per ticket.

One dollah? you say. The eighth part of a Star Wars ticket for the real thing? A bag of chips or a coke from a vending machine? About half of a real good cup of coffee at Starbucks? We could have scratched an itch that itched us since the dawn of man, since our ancestors looked up and saw those strange-tailed fuzzballs littering the sky and tossed virgins into volcanoes to appease them? Really, we could have had a comet for a dollah?

My partisanship shows, certainly, since I WORK for the project. But I ain't in it for the money, it's for the fun and adventure. And I'm hoping the rest of the American people will see it that way too and agitate a little -- just a little -- to get the project restored. Our fate has entered the political realm, since there is a small but non-zero chance that Congress could restore funding.

Meanwhile, are there any billionaires out there who would like to go down in history as the PRIVATE financiers of the first-ever landing on a comet? Bill Gates? (Good way to buff your image.) Steven Spielberg or George Lucas? (Think of the movie possibilities.) There must be some vision somewhere.