Sometimes I'm impatient with NASA's pace of missions, but ESA is amazingly slow. I certainly welcome their EXOMARS mission probe. It appears that it will be an exciting mission to search for organics among other studies. However, launch in 2011 and arrive in 2013.... Does anyone ever do cost of money calculations in these missions? There seems to be little sense of the "time is money" truism. I am particularly surprised by their evident acceptance that some saving in fuel which results in 2 year trip to mars instead of 6 mo trip is worth the extra time. Maybe someone could enlighten me on this, but it seems a poor tradeoff.

EXOMARS