QUESTION: 
What would you do differently today?

ANSWER from Glenn Orton on January 26, 1996:
It might be easy for me at JPL, the home of 3-axis stabilized spacecraft,
to say that we should not have made Galileo a dual-spin spacecraft, but
make it so that it's fixed in space all the time.  However, the dual-spin
mode, where part of it is spinning and the other part "despun" so that it's
fixed in space for cameras, spectrometers and photometers, etc. makes it easy
for the magnetic field and plasma experiments to sense what is all
around them (they LIKE to spin through the magnetic field and the electrical
currents!).  Still there are a number of restrictions on where we can look,
if we want to look back toward the sun and earth, for example, we have to 
move the whole spacecraft because the antenna is in the way.  That's a major
use of propulsion fuel.

I certainly would not have launched Galileo on the Space Shuttle.  There was
really no need, any more than spacecraft in the past, to have used a flight
with a human crew.  However, NASA's policy back then was the EVERYTHING was
to be launched with the Space Shuttle, so we wouldn't have to spend money
on rockets that were"expendable", that is, they were unable to be used again
afterwards.  Now, we are operating with a "mixed fleet", with both space
shuttle and expendable rockets, particularly after the Challener explosion
10 years ago taught us that launches are always risky!