When George Bush redirected America's space agency, nasa, away from scientific research and towards manned space exploration in 2004, many were disappointed. Human spaceflight is expensive and, since the end of the Apollo programme in 1972, has yielded little or nothing in the way of science. Robotic missions, by contrast, have visited every planet in the solar system, many moons, several asteroids and even the odd comet. This week plans were unveiled to mitigate the disaster. Scientists from three continents, having accepted the inevitable, have been working quietly on plans to rescue something useful from it. Intriguingly, their chosen forum has been not nasa, but the European Space Agency, esa.
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