> The New Horizons spacecraft [...] reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system [...]. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag.
Does anyone know why this would be so expensive? A slice of Deep Space Network time must be expensive but it still sounds like an outrageous figure to me.
You need people for mission operations, to calibrate the data, and to do science with the data. You need access to the Deep Space Network. Beyond that, there is outreach.
This can easily come to several million dollars a year. It's a tiny fraction of what we pay on completely meaningless stuff. More is spent on the average US Congressional race every two years, and there are 435 of those. Surely we can spend this much to keep one of humanity's most distant spacecraft working.
You would be surprised how much science can be done with an old mission like this, both with the data they already have on hand and with new data. It looks like they have several dozen scientists working on the project (not all necessarily full time).
In any case, putting this into perspective, I don't see how it could be a waste to spend $14.7 million / year to keep one of the most distant probes humanity has sent out into space working.