Re: Excellent work!
"The biggest cost in these missions is not the hardware. It's in the launch "
Not even remotely close. Launch costs are a small percentage of mission costs.
As are the _actual_ hardware costs (ie: the marginal cost of making the final production item which flies, plus its spare, which is normally used as a ground-based simulation rig once the launch goes off ok)
Most of the money goes in labour costs for designing and prototyping dozens-to-hundreds of test models which will never be flown and in most cases never even exposed to a vacuum chamber or vibration test rig.
These are necessary to make sure that the item which goes up, stays working, and doesn't fail in unexpected ways (but of course they still do for one-off missions as they're necessarily going to encounter unexpected conditions, such as ice so hard it broke the drill and it's hard to simulate what 3 years of power-off, deep-space cold-soak temperatures do to a thruster without investing billions into enough vaccuum chambers and chilling kit to keep the test items that cold for that long.)
Making a dozen flight articles would add a few percent onto the mission cost as the R&D cost is already sunk. Making and flying a dozen Beagles would have cost roughly double what 1 did. (The percentage hit on other missions is less, because Beagle was done extremely cheaply - so cheaply that it reused test components and that was probably what killed it (the most likely scenario is iced up airbags which didn't inflate properly or which split. They were watersoaked, patched and overweight when packed for flight)
The problem is that space missions are seriously strapped for cash. Space isn't sexy except for Geeks. At its peak spending, expenditure on NASA was less than the US public spent on outboard motors in any given year or pizza delivery charges. These days NASA's entire budget is less than Google spends lobbying the US congress (and Google is one of the smaller lobbyists) or what the US military spends operating airconditioned tents in the Middle East.
If there was more money available, organisations could afford to be less cautious. Getting things wrong in spaceflight results in budgets being cut, not boosted to make up the difference as funding is fixed and mostly based on "national prestige" or PR value.
As it is, 80-90% of proposed space missions deemed scientifically worthwhile never get past the funding proposal stage (which in turn leads to a lot of people scatter-gunning badly thought-out proposals in the blind hope of catching a crumb or two). Those that do get funded tend to pick up lots of "hitchhikers" en-route between mission core and launchpad as it's easier to propose add-ons than separate flights and some lose funding before launch for myriad reasons. There are plenty of completed spacecraft sitting around NASA/ESA/Russian warehouses which have been waiting 20+ years for a ride which will never come.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
