Rocky start
Galileo has had a romantic history, often flirting with disaster but always scraping through. The craft was scheduled for launch in 1986, but the explosion of the Challenger shuttle meant it had to wait till 1989. By then, the Centaur booster rocket, originally thought essential for sending such a big spacecraft to Jupiter, had been banned from the shuttle. The solution was an arcane orbit that passed Venus once and Earth twice to gain gravitational boosts.
Disaster strikes
With the craft on its way, engineers tried to open its 5-metre main antenna. The antenna stuck, and it seemed…
