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Comment by Sodaware | Hacker News Reader

I really hope that companies like SpaceX reduce the cost of space travel to the point where we can send out more probes to check things like this. It's early days for private space travel, but I think the next 10-15 years are going to be very exciting.

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Not sure that they'll help much since most of the costs aren't launch related:

"The total cost of [the Cassini-Hughes] scientific exploration mission is about US$3.26 billion, including $1.4 billion for pre-launch development, $704 million for mission operations, $54 million for tracking and $422 million for the launch vehicle."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens

Space probes are already cheap for what they accomplish. For comparison, we could have sent about 45 Cassini probes for what has been spent on the International Space Station (all costs in).

I work for NASA in a planetary science organization, so let me say this: cost accounting of space missions is unique to the way NASA/ESA operates. Much of that cost is tied up in things like paying researchers and graduate students to do studies during the decades of time between missions, obscene university overheads, re-inventing the wheel with a new spacecraft design for every mission, prime contractors who attempt to maximize the number of subcontractors and resulting complexity because that awards them points in the selection committee, etc.

Private industry could do it way, way cheaper. SpaceX could probably build and launch 45 Cassini probes for what cost to do Cassini–Huygens.

Let's see how things go, thus far SpaceX has proved they can get stuff into orbit but they aren't super-cheap yet.

Private industry can do a lot of things but a Cassini probe mission for $71 million all in seems unlikely in the near future.

NASA has a contract with SpaceX for 12 supply missions at $1.6 billion while NASA says a shuttle launch was about $450 million (but that figure probably doesn't include all the costs).

So SpaceX at this stage is at about 25-33% the cost of a space shuttle mission, but that's still a long way until we get to "45 Cassini probes" for $3.2 billion.

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