NASA's Curiosity Rover Celebrates One Year On Mars 69
An anonymous reader writes "The Curiosity rover celebrates one year on Mars today. 'The 1-ton robot has achieved a great deal in its 12 months on Mars, discovering an ancient streambed and gathering enough evidence for mission scientists to declare that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. And more big finds could be in the offing, as Curiosity is now trekking toward its ultimate science destination: the foothills of a huge and mysterious mountain that preserves, in its many layers, a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions.'"
Re:Who can convince me it was worth it? (Score:2, Interesting)
In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.
Such as war.
US defense budget for 2012: $1.030–$1.415 trillion (wikipedia)
NASA budget for 2012: 18.724 billion (wikipedia)
I don't have an exact number, but the Curiosity rover cost about 1.5 billion dollars. I don't know if that is just the rover itself, or the whole operation.
Re:Who can convince me it was worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Was it worth it? Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.
Basically MSL (aka Curiosity) was the full-employment program for JPL contractors. While everything else was being cut, all the contractors and JPL employees tried to bill as much as possible to this program to avoid redundancies (layoffs). Sadly, these kind of employees tend to be attached to expensive toys which makes the for lower efficiency when judged by the $/employed metric.
FWIW, they at least managed to land to rover on the (martian) ground. In that sense, it probably was better spent than the billons we spend on other employment programs which simply return only employment, or fund things that are actually unused (like bridges to nowhere, or airports with no scheduled flights) or actually unwanted (e.g, F35, MEADS, EFV).
Sadly, it's a pretty low bar when it comes to government spending...
Re:Who can convince me it was worth it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, the cost was worth it.
The acquisition of truth is our only intrinsically meaningful purpose for existing. Everything else is basically just a means to this end, or sheer hedonism.
I am aware of all the usual objections to this statement. They are all bunk.
Re:Who can convince me it was worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire mission is cited at about $2.5 billion. The US federal budget for FY2013 calls for over $3.8 trillion in expenditures.