A Mission to Uranus Would Be Expensive, and Worth It

tech.hindustantimes.com:

 If you want to visit Uranus, you need to start planning early. Designing and building a craft to cross the billion-plus miles might take a decade, and the cruise to the solar system's third-largest planet could require an additional 15 years.

Undaunted, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended last month that the U.S. should launch a mission to Uranus for the first time since 1986.

Visiting the outer reaches of the solar system is likely to cost more than $4 billion. But the return on that investment will go well beyond the groundbreaking discoveries craved by scientists and outer space buffs. It will also play an important role in attracting and training the next generation of space scientists and engineers, ensuring continued U.S. leadership of a field it's dominated for decades.

During the early years of the space race, human crews received most of the attention. But the U.S. was also establishing itself as a formidable leader in exploring the solar system with robotic spacecraft. These missions helped develop and maintain a workforce proficient in a range of skills, from low-light photography to power systems appropriate for long space missions.

By the mid-1960s the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's confidence in its abilities led to planning for a grand tour of the solar system's outer planets. Launches would take place in the late 1970s, with flybys occurring into the late 1980s.

For NASA and its research laboratories, the long wait was a feature, not a bug. As far back as 1967, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the federally funded research and development center that's built and managed many of NASA's interplanetary explorers, used the grand tour as a means to recruit. For