NASA's Europa Clipper is a $4.25 billion armored, solar-powered spacecraft carrying a poem by Ada Limon, the word water in 103 languages, and a microchip with 2.6 million names toward an ice-covered ocean moon. This deep dive unpacks the saga of getting it off the ground: the fight to move from the SLS to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy that saved an estimated $2 billion and avoided a $1 billion vibration redesign, the last-minute transistor scare solved by self-healing annealing, and the Hurricane Milton delay before the October 14, 2024 launch.

From there the episode explains why the probe flies toward Mars and back past Earth to steal orbital momentum, why it will never orbit Europa itself but instead perform 49 close flybys from a long Jupiter orbit to survive 2.8 megarads of radiation, and how a titanium vault nested inside the propellant tanks  ...