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by twic 1159 days ago
Europa Clipper, which weighs about the same, is planned to make the same trip in five and a half years, and could have done it in less than three if it had launched on SLS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper#Launch_and_traj...

Ariane 5 is not particularly powerful as interplanetary launchers go.

1 comments

Tony Bruno of ULA wrote a nice blog related to this recently. Most launchers are optimized for either LEO or the high energy orbits/interplanetary and are not really well suited to the opposite mission. See Figure 1 for a nice graphic.

https://medium.com/@ToryBrunoULA/the-secrets-of-rocket-desig...