Ice Giants Mission When?

You guys are boring. If one of you was at least a lava giant or something...

>>8776291
Boring planets are boring.
Nobody cares about aquaman and butthole planets.

>>8776307
>>8776311
They have some pretty interesting moons.
Also, they'd probably be less boring if we know more than jack-shit about them.

>>8776291
Uranus and Neptune have the big problem where they're too fucking far away.
A lot of space exploration missions suffer from, what they view as, bipolar leadership. Political leadership and budget changes too fast in comparison to the time it takes to plan, put together, launch, and execute a mission.

Then there's the time problem. Right now, we don't have rockets capable of putting a probe on a simple Hohmann transfer to Uranus or Neptune (Uranus 16 years, Neptune a whopping 40 years), making us spend even longer using gravity assists.
The fear here is that halfway through the decades-long cruise, we might something capable of much shorter transfer times. Like a nuclear-powered electrical space probe bus of sorts, letting us place a new probe at Uranus/Neptune before our original one arrives.

>>8776960
>before the original one arrive
>literally "why do something when someone else might do it for you for free" thinking
And this is why we can't have nice things.

>>8776978
Yeah, it fucks up space exploration beyond Saturn. But we're on the right track now with stuff like VASIMR, which will hopefully open up the outer system to exploration.

File: thor and the ice giants.png (190KB, 500x664px) Image search: [Google]

190KB, 500x664px

>>8776291
Just let Thor take care of them

Do they have any helium-3? Might be useful for fuel if they have less of the radiative assrape of Saturn and Jupiter.

File: beavis.jpg (17KB, 480x360px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 480x360px

>>8776291

>>8777023
How is that thing doing these days anyway? I remember som talk of putting a test-version on ISS, but no new info about it for a frmew years as far as i can tell

>>8776291
Uranus mission will never get funded because SOME GERMAN GUY thought it was a good idea to name a planet Uranus.