Yes, the twin MER lander/rovers are going to cost about $800 million. By way of comparison, the twin Viking orbiter/landers (no rovers) cost billions. The failed MO orbiter cost a billion, while MGS cost somewhat under $300 million, if memory serves.
You can't simply look at a mission's price tag and determine if it falls into the category of FBC. Any way you plan it, going to Europa or Pluto is going to be expensive, if for no other reason than those mission will require a bigger and more expensive launch vehicle and some form of nuclear power supply.
The old NASA way of doing things was to throw huge teams and tons of money at any problem. It dated back to the go-go 1960s attitude of "Waste anything but time." Unfortunately for NASA, Congress would not fund that kind of wastefulness (except for pork projects in their districts), so they had to find a better way of doing things. FBC was a start. They made some mistakes by trying to cut too deep, especially from testing, but they learned. Without the lessons learned, there's no way that you'd have those two MER landers about to arrive at Mars.
Space/Science » in reply to FBC seems to have been tossed by the wayside.
Price alone isn't a good measure of FBC
The whole thread (39 posts)
- "Problems with Mars probes? The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves"
- Money alone isn't the solution
- FBC seems to have been tossed by the wayside.
- Some Things You Overlooked
- re: Some Things You Overlooked
- Key quote
- Money alone isn't the solution