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Comment by AcerbicZero | Hacker News Reader

450M just for building the robot seems a bit steep; its not like they're actually getting it to the moon for that price. How much cheaper is it than just sending 3 dudes in a tin can to just dig the holes themselves?

Edit: I guess NASA says manned missions will cost billions. Still seems like half a billion is a lot for a glorified DJI drone thats only gotta make it to the moon lol. Regardless, money spent towards any space project tends to be money well spent, so compared to all the other spending I'd like to complain about, this isn't even on the radar.

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If the documentary, "Armageddon" taught me anything, they'll do it if you just agree that they never have to pay taxes again, they can sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, and that you will cancel out a few parking tickets.

You're paying for provably guaranteed reliability.

When you're paying billions per rocket launch, you simply can't afford to have your robot break down on day 1 because of a software bug or because a component was accidently installed upside down.

(Also, "only gotta make it to the moon" makes it sound like that's a trivial task. There's a lot to unpack in that small sentence.)

You can if you send 10 cheap robots instead of one half-billion dollar one.

weight

I think you underestimate the engineering complexity a bit of these rovers :)

The very first Apple Watch cost a billion dollars to make. Costs got quickly amortized after that first unit.

If NASA was in the habit of building hundreds of robots at a time, the cost per unit would drop dramatically.

When you put it in that context, the rovers look like an absolute bargain!

> a glorified DJI drone

Where "glorified" means "can withstand temperature, radiation, and dust conditions that would brick a DJI drone in short order.

The risk of losing 3 dudes is greater than $450m.

Risk avoidance has its place, but fear didn't get us to the moon the first time and I'm confident it wont work this time either.

You're probably right in this specific example, or at least you're probably in-line with NASA's leadership's thinking.

I am willing to bet that other parts of society (e.g. traffic planners and automobile manufacturers) have a much lower cost of human life.

For NASA the cost of dead people includes bad PR

Not really, SpaceX would just sell that as an unscheduled disassembly + “we collected data”.

It’s widely accepted that you may die going to space in experimental vehicles, nobody ever said it would be safe, and nobody can reasonably think it is risk-free.

Apollo 1 folks died, not a problem for reputation of NASA.

People put valuations on lives all the time in risk analysis and I've never seen a cost even close to $100m.

DOT puts it at 13.2m: https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

Finding someone who agrees to go to the moon with a risk of 1 out 2 of dying, and 1 of 2 of becoming a historical hero is really doable.

Plenty of volunteers, and no need for 100M USD.

People go to war for less than 50K USD.

The odds of dying in a war are less than 1 in 2, and for joining the military in general it is far far less.

?! I was like, "oh really?" and I checked... you're right, "a German soldier had approximately a 1 in 3 chance of dying during the WW2 conflict"

Dying to protect a political system vs dying to advance science, better pick science.

And that is an exceptional example. For most modern wars or major conflicts it's nowhere near as bad as 1 in 3.

In WWII young men volunteered to join RAF bomber crews and faced an almost 1-in-2 chance of dying, with a far higher chance of getting wounded or captured.

The city I'm from, there are people who'll kill for USD equivalent of $100. That does not mean we should encourage it.

Astronauts are very visible deaths for politicians whose currency is points in the polls. Having your photo not show up on the news next to a photo of a dead square-jawed captain america astronaut is probably worth 100m of other peoples money.

They wouldn't be "astronauts". They'd be cargo.

Factor in the PR impact on the entire space program given the public visibility.

We've never had an astronaut crew get stranded on the moon. though we got close with Apollo 13. If/when that happens for the first time, you'd better believe the entire planet will be paying attention.

Just the congressional inquiries alone will set the space program back by decades.

This. It seems average Americans, including average hn commenters, have their future outlook confined to the next fiscal quarter.

Thats for the average person - whats the cost to replace the average astronaut? I've seen estimates that it costs $15M just to train 1 astronaut, and the pool of qualified candidates is likely extremely small. I would figure a guess of $100M per astronaut is not unreasonable.

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