I disagree. 2.5 billion dollars is worth a lot of lives. Consider how many people you could save from, say, malnutrition with that money. I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot. And we as a society have decided that space exploration is actually more important than saving those people. Now, you can agree or disagree with society on that point, but either way, a lot is riding on this, even measured in units of human life. If the thing crashes into the ground, we wasted money we could have done something else with. A lot of something.
> I disagree. 2.5 billion dollars is worth a lot of lives. Consider how many people you could save from, say, malnutrition with that money.
With that argument you could argue that any loss of money is unimportant, because it could have been used better. This amount has been invested for Mars exploration, so a mission failure would be a net loss.
I really hope you are joking. You really want to maintain this money was diverted from being spent on tackling malnutrition? The US spending on Iraq must really tick you off.
Not joking. If you have 2.5 billion dollars, you can spend it on what you want. Congress shifts money around all the time. They just want to spend it on rovers.
Now, to be clear, I think there are plenty of good arguments that spending a marginal 2.5 billion dollars to put a robot on Mars is actually the right call, in terms of its long term benefits for humanity. Wasn't taking a position on that either way. My point is just that you can measure the cost (and, by assumption, benefits if we're successful) in units of human lives, and that it's a big number. That's wiped out if the rover crashes, so a lot is riding on that code.
You might argue that the risk of failure is priced into the tradeoff society made. You might also argue that not all of the value of sending the rover is destroyed if the landing fails. Those both seem uncompelling, but I haven't thought too hard about it.
US spending on Iraq does, in fact, really tick me off. It's an enormously inefficient use of resources.
