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Eh. The total cost of its program ($35.6 billion) almost came to exactly $1 billion per death incurred by accidents during its testing from 1991-2000(36 fatalities). All that money and life spent on a somewhat functional newly minted freedom boner.

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I don't think "death per budget" is a meaningful metric, unless talking about weapons or serial killers. You can't just take two numbers we want to minimize, divide one by another, and claim significance.

Multiplying them would be more meaningful.

Is $35 billion a lot of money? We did get a step forward in engineering. The lessons learned advanced our knowledge forever. The money spent in actual wars for little things like air conditioning, for example, cost more:

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-w...

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