With the imminent death of Cassini after 15 years, and the Opportunity Rover 14 years old and showing its age, and Voyager 1 at 40 years, and space being "...big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is..." I got to thinking about projects that might span multiple scientists' lifetimes.
Practically speaking, after all the schooling and then working your way up the corporate (or government) ladder, you might be as young as 30 when you get onto a Big Space Project.
From there you could have 30 years of practical, hands-on, operational role in a project (like Cassini), of which 4-10 will be getting budget, testing, building, and launching the craft.
So that leaves you with 20 years of practical hands-on experience with a flying, active project. Which is not a lot of time, when you think about how big our solar system really is.
So are there projects on the boards now that are planned to span more than one human generation of engineers?
Clearly Voyager has seen almost a complete staff turnover. But are there projects that are planned to be productive beyond the lifetime of a single generation of scientists?
I figure francopoli and kleinbl00 and Dala might have some input, and I welcome comments from anyone else. Let's not get too sci-fi, but Musk's plans for Mars obviously fall into this category, too...
Alan Stern, the lead on New Horizons has spent an entire career making this mission happen. His first proposal for a Kuiper Belt/Pluto Probe was in the mid-80's. This is a whole career pushing for a singular mission. The Jupiter moon missions are being pushed by people who were engineers for the Voyagers. Something tells me that you do not mean a whole lifetime to get something launched, but there are a few examples.
Yeah, I am thinking of a group of scientists designing something they know they won't see, because the next generation will be the ones to actually fly it, or do science with it. Like KB said below, the "pyramid-builder" type of planning, rather than the, "holy shit! That thing is still running! Let's do more science with it!" like we see with Voyager and Curiosity.
NASA thinks more along the lines of "What sequence of missions do we need to push exploration forward in a particular direction, or to help a particular discipline?". There was already a mission planned to Europa, so they get to pat themselves on the back and say "toldja so". No current plans exist for a lander (we were explicitly warned to attempt no landing). Like others have said, the Voyager probes are the closest thing to what you're thinking of, I guess. They're still sending back data very relevant to other operational missions, most notably IBEX, and all for pennies in operation costs. [Edit: this stuff] Big missions almost always only get scrapped because the spacecraft runs out of fuel or it stops working for other reasons. For instance, it's predicted that the Juno mission will completely succumb to radiation damage within two or three years, but hopefully, before then, they'll manage to fly it down into Jupiter like they're about to do Cassini into Saturn. BTW, big props to Lockheed for fucking up the Juno spacecraft and thus the orbit, 'preciate it, guys. I agree with 'bl00, though, no one really thinks significantly "long term" at the organizational level, save governments, and those don't always do the best of jobs. Apparently the primal urge to provide for your children isn't that strong or common enough or something. Serious thought towards 20+ year strategy certainly doesn't seem to be a business incentive if you're paying lip service to the "10%+ growth annually no matter what" mentality. It's also just plain hard to predict the distant future of an institution or business. I'd like to analyze The Vatican's modus operandi more (preferably without Robert Langdon), they've been very effective at staying influential for the better part of two millennia. Maybe all we need to do is indoctrinate everyone! Recently, I've spent some time planning the next 30 - 40 years of my life. Things look good. I've also given some thought to what I want my mission(s) to do, but never enough.
I know of three, actually two. Cosmos 1 and its descendants are an attempt to suss out the practicality of solar sails, ostensibly with an eye to interstellar exploration. However, they're barely out of proof-of-concept. Yuri Milner's folly is a laser-boosted constellation of lightsails. DARPA's 100-year starship is more PR project than engineering project. The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society had this hanging up in their clubhouse. I tried to cajole them into letting me scan it for two solid years. Eventually I gave up, but kept hounding the Internet. Eventually someone else managed to scan someone else's copy and now it's freely available to everyone. I got it printed up full size and mounted and gave it as a housewarming gift. It's impressive. It's also outsider art. When you start talking about "multi-generational" and "government planning" you start seeing some real shortfalls in vision and sanity. We are not a pyramid-building people any longer.
This is kinda what I was thinking... I imagined highly-skilled high school students being recruited for specific learning programs at Stanford (for example), with the intent of them eventually going to work for Lockheed/SpaceX/NASA/whoever, in a specific role, with a specific set of skills. (The pro sports model, but for science.) Which feels really Chinese/communist, but also, really cool in some way... I mean, what kid doesn't want to grow up to be an astronaut, right? But it is also clearly high risk. What if the kid gets hit by a bus? Or decides to become a glass-blower artist in Laguna Beach? Or...? But... we are no longer pyramid-building people... yeah... When you start talking about "multi-generational" and "government planning" you start seeing some real shortfalls in vision and sanity. We are not a pyramid-building people any longer.
I don't think it's a bad thing. Major public works projects in the ancient world were conducted at the behest of a hereditary dynasty. And thing is? They aren't that common, either. Giza took 10-20 years. The big European castles were works-in-progress depending on who was living there and how long they'd been. Chartres only took 26 years. Yeah the Great Wall was a 2000 year process but one of the tenets of Confucianism is "don't rock the boat, the past is fine, progress is an affront to God" and if the Chinese hadn't valued stability over literally everything else they probably would have landed on the moon about 400AD. The thing about a project that happens in your lifetime? It edifies your life. Look at this guy. Mutherfucker was eight years old, hiding from the Nazis. Made it to the US, went to school, started doing secret shit straight out of college and was seventy fucking four years old before he could even tell anybody what he was doing. That's delayed gratification but I bet that if you'd told him at 21 that his grandchildren would eventually get to reap the bounty of the shit he was doing? Yeah, he'd have done it... but I'll bet it'd be a damn sight harder.
We will be examining the data coming out of telescopes like Hubble and (when it launches) James Webb for many years to come. The beauty of astrophysics and astronomy is that the data never becomes useless -- there could always be some new discovery that is discovered with the help of, or bolstered by, older data. Plus, there's Curiosity on Mars, too!
Absolutely! We learned new shit about our own solar system when Pioneer started sending weird data... scientists re-analyzed everything, and realized there was something else going on. Which they, being clever scientists, named The Pioneer Effect Catchy, huh? :-)