But it also means that you can't rationally budget for something like a manned Mars mission, since if things go wrong, no expense would be spared to save the crew. A corollary is if the crew is lost, there would be years of investigation and safety theater, like post-Columbia
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A fun exercise is to re-read
@andyweirauthor's magnificent book, the Martian, and keep track of all the science missions that get cancelled or co-opted in the course of saving one dude. Everyone sees it as heroic, of course. But that's like a third of the NSF budget sacrificed!Show this thread -
Apollo 13 didn't offer any real opportunities to burn through an entire agency budget trying to save the crew. But a Mars mission, or lunar base, would be different. Those would be on the scale of years, plenty of time to cost us a fortune if anything went wrong.
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The good news is, no one is going anywhere in our lifetime, since the economy died. But when we eventually have a working space program again, send the robots! Let human space flight become what it is meant to be, a nostalgia engine for old men, like military history or baseball
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They didn't spend anything beyond what was already spent to send them to the Moon, they couldn't get to them in time.

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Maybe some extra staff hours on the ground?
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Counterpoint: if Apollo 11’s Eagle hadn’t been able to take off from the Moon, all they were going to do was have Nixon give a speech. Probably an investigation after that, and then the end of crewed space flight as we know it.
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True, but only because no amount of money could possibly make a difference in a mission with time scales like that. Throwing money wasn't even an option
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