Once in 176 Years

Gary did.

In 1964, Gary was a 30 year old intern at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Houston who’d been assigned a tough task … how to send probes to distant planets …. Now the distances are typically so great that travelling to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune could take 30 years or more … which no probe could likely survive given the unknown ravages of space or forgetting even the potential costs to launch and manage it.

But then Gary had an idea .. and that was to plot the positions of the planets a few years out so that maybe the probes could leverage a gravity assist from one planet to pick up some speed to visit a second one … so he set to work … and was stunned to find out that in roughly 10 years .. .and for the only time in about 176 year span … all four of the planets would be in the exact same area of space … so if NASA could launch a probe in the late 1970s then it could visit not just two planets but all four. Well it wasn’t easy but NASA realized they had a once in lifetime shot at it, found the funding!

Today, the spacecraft launched by NASA thanks to clever trajectories identified by Gary Flandro, have sent back incredible data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune … and even more incredibly are now in interstellar basis outside of our solar system … still sending back data today 40 years after they launched … Voyager 1 and 2

The Voyager Spacecraft are a great idea because examining data and creating projections can not only help you predict the future but make the future.