Headscratchers / Europa Report

• Exactly what does the octupus at the end eat exactly? There's no evidence of an active ecosystem for a predator of the size shown at the end, so shouldn't it have starved to death due to a lack of viable food long before the crew even gets to Europa?
  • Some type of fish-like alien that lives further down? Just because its the only macroscopic lifeform we see, doesn't mean its the only one, or even that its the largest.
  • Aside from that, it could also feed on extremely small life forms, akin to the blue whale's diet consisting primarily of krill.
• Exactly how is all this footage getting back to earth? Are they dropping satellite buoys to piggyback all the way to earth? There is no way their communication equipment has the range to beam audio, much less video back to earth as there's range to contend with and background radiation and noise messing with the signal.
• If doesn't make much sense at all that the ship was completely cut off from contact with Earth (other than for the plot) a ship of that size would certainly have a backup system, hardened to radiation and turned off so storms wouldn't effect it. They even would have a crappy low-baud signal system they could communicate with Earth via, even if it was just in short text messages.
  • It's also a little confusing that only their communications were blocked, and not any other systems of the ship. They still move along just fine, continuing their mission - no one even seems to fear that Earth may have been harmed by the same solar blast.
• It doesn't make sense to have important parts of the ship that would absolutely have to be repaired if broken outside of the ship requiring a spacewalk to repair, unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. Spacewalks are dangerous and a drain on resources - the ISS even tries everything inside before having to go out. The communication panels and boards should have been accessible from the inside - there was no need (outside of Drama) to put them outside.
  • You could make a Fridge Horror argument for this, just like with the probe and freezing below- they cheaped out on the mission. Picking a cheaper part that's "close enough" to temperature requirements, not installing redundant systems because just having the one is "good enough" (and less expensive!), making two probes was "too expensive" so they're only going with one... Makes you wonder what kind of payout the families of the astronauts received, don't it?
    • Even if trying to do things on the cheap, that would not really explain any lack of redundancies in critical systems. The ship by itself is an investment. Since this wasn't intended to be a suicide mission, that ship is meant to come back to Earth, which means that it can be reused. Any choice that means a single failure would result in the loss of the ship increases the chance of losing both the money spent on the ship and the money required to build a replacement with nothing to show for the now doubled investment. I can't see the design getting approved by anyone trying to save money when a reusable ship that's much likelier to keep coming back and be reused is a much better sell than one that's a deathtrap and likely to be lost on its first mission.
• Considering the critical nature of the remote-operated probe, why was there no backup? Anything that's going to be remotely operated in an almost totally unknown (outside of theoretical models) environment is going to have to face up to pretty high odds of loss. It would have made sense to take it as a given that the first probe would end up lost/damaged/irrecoverable and have at least one more to deploy when the situation is understood.
• You're sending a ship to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, in the outer Solar System, where temperatures are usually WELL below freeze point (in Europa's case some -275ºF) and your landing pod malfunctions because a component freezes. Why? Weren't the designers and engineers supposed to expect unearthly cold temperatures?
• What is this "only one shot" nonsense? Europa's not going away. They could send robot explorers to perform further surveys before sending people. True, Earth and Jupiter/Europa only line up for optimal trajectories ever 13 months, but waiting another 13, 26, or even 39 months for survey data (and a first attempt to find life) would not add too much to the already-multi-year planning time. Did their financing depend that much on the reality show aspect?
  • The implication is that nobody else was even considering funding a mission, and that the huge cost and personal risk of the mission meant that if they didn't produce some kind of positive result to justify the enormous cost and dangers, then nobody else was going to do it again. Somewhat justified Truth in Television - we have seen that ourselves with the original space race. Once the Apollo program was completed, nobody has been back to the Moon in 50 years because the enormous cost and risk produce nothing of monetary or scientific value that justifies the enormous cost and effort.

---