Q&A with Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator on NASA’s Dawn mission

NASA has decided to launch the multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission — a spacecraft to study a moon of Jupiter with an icy crust covering a liquid water ocean — aboard a commercial heavy-lift rocket in October 2024, and not on the government-owned Space Launch System, officials said Wednesday.

A senior NASA official said Monday the agency could select two new robotic planetary science missions next year for launch in the early 2020s, and the five finalists favor Venus and asteroid research.

In nearly five years on the job as Boeing’s Space Launch System program manager, John Shannon has presided over the completion of the first SLS core stage inside a cavernous factory in New Orleans.