Lilliput in Space

For at least the next five years, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, six tons of brute technology laboriously wending its way to Saturn and its giant moon Titan, will serve nicely as a bloated billboard with this message: The era of big, unmanned space missions is over. Not only did the craft's considerable heft force an impressively circuitous route that depends on the gravitational pull of three heavenly bodies, but its $2 billion cost clashed ominously with the U.S. space agency's shrinking budget.