Frank Glover wrote in
:

dean wrote:

Two, if it was possible to "lose" it once we lost contact, would we,
NASA or ESA for example, bother trying to mount a rescue mission? I
would imagine building another vehicle capable o just a
journey...would be expensive. Would we spend millions to resuce five
or six people.


If the rescuers' travel time is longer than the first ship's most
optomistic life-support estimates, then there's not much point, right?

However, if the event doesn't destroy all interest in manned
exploration of Europa (assuming the first ship got all the way there
before falling silent), another mission will still go, in order to:

1. Do what the first mission intended to do, and...

2. Try to find out what happened to the first ship. This would be
valuable information, even if rescuing survivors is impossible (return
of their remains is also desirable, but not mission-justifying by
itself). This is done with long lost ships and aircraft, all the time.
Even decades later, we want to know what happened. Spaceships will be
no different.

3. Find out why the computer went berserk, cut the comm link, and killed
the crew.

:-)


--
JRF

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