Hacker News Reader

NASA loves to downplay expectations in case something goes wrong, but people really underappreciate just how overengineered these things are, which makes sense when a bad mission can be political suicide for their future funding.

View on HN

It was also incredibly on budget. I think Sagan says in the book it cost the individual American taxpayers in the single digit dollars.

Single digit dollar sounds more like the Appollo program. I think it's been a long time since the entire NASA budget was more than a penny per tax dollar.

NASA says the voyager mission cost 865 million dollars from the start in 1972 to Neptune encounter in 1989, and currently runs at 7 mllion dollars per year.

So that would be $7.72 per taxpayer, a single-digit dollar amount.

(based on number of taxpayers in 1989 -- using the numbers from 1972, it would be a low double-digit amount).

Totalled up, yes - fair enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com