“I recently had a chance to ask one of the leaders of the European side about the likelihood of Europe’s budgetary woes impacting their plans. He didn’t seem too concerned, which surprised me.”

Phil Plait has pointed out on a few occasions how small even Nasa’s budget is compared to other costs. Remember, the US military spends a couple of million dollars—per minute. Even those European countries which spend more than 1% (which is a lot) of the GNP on pure science still spend little when compared to other costs. So, what should if matter if the other, bigger costs increase somewhat?

Say you normally go out to eat once a week. Say your car dies and you unexpectedly have to buy a new one. This is a large, unplanned cost. Would you skip going out to eat that week, or indeed every week until the new car is paid off? Probably not. (If your new car is so expensive that you can’t afford to go out to eat once a week, you are doing something wrong.)

” I cannot claim to understand how the European agencies develop their funding plans, but the claim which this guy made to me is that their process is slower and steadier than the way we do things in the US. I hope this proves correct …”

There is probably something to this. The advantage of several sovereign countries collaborating on a large project is that a country will usually make a commitment only if enough other countries do. As a result, contracts are drawn up which one can’t simply back out of, like the US Congress did with the SCS. This is at least part of the reason why CERN, ESO, ESA etc are actually quite good in terms of scientific output for a given amount of money. The bigger the science, the longer the timescale one has to plan on, much longer than a typical legislature period (i.e. time between elections).

there is other interesting stuff out there than gravitaional waves and other interesting fields of science. besides, ground based gravitational wave detectors are easier that ground based planetary science.

I think it makes much more sense to wait a bit until we know what kind of signal we can expect before embarking on a “large” mission. compare that to the planetology of Jupiters icy moons: we know exactly that there is interesting stuff going on, the field is well developed and it is about time to make a large scale effort to study them.

You are being very diplomatic. A mission to the moons of Jupiter is garbage compared to something that might have given us detailed information on gravitational waves and their sources.

But it will produce more pretty pictures (in false color).

It will take on strong new life once gravitational waves are observed terrestrially, and even stronger once they are seen in the polarized CMB. But even then don’t hold your breath. But it will happen eventually. 2030 – 2035 might be a good estimate for launch and science.

Sorbet, LIGO is a US project, and the ground-based GW community (which involves projects and collaborators in Europe, Japan, India, and Australia) has a *lot* of US involvement. LISA was developed quite a bit under NASA support (in partnership with the European Space Agency) for quite a while, but NASA is simply spread too thin to do everything that has been identified as important and interesting. We’re lucky that Europe hasn’t pulled back, and that there may be an opportunity to join their efforts.