the amount of money that will never be recovered
It's not like they're stuffing the spacecraft with greenbacks. The money stays right here in the economy regardless; and it's not like we'd get much of the equipment built with it back in usable shape either way.
A failed mission means a loss of science, and perhaps life if it's a manned mission, but there's no loss of money that's significantly different from a successful mission.
In fact, in a sense it might even be cheaper because you don't have to keep paying all those scientists to analyze the signals from the mission.
You people want to run while still trying to master crawling. Baby steps, people.
You'll never learn to run if you never try it, Ebeneezer. You'll spend eternity crawling. You see, you'll never acquire the necessary skills if, before you even try, you throw your hands up and give up.
You'll never develop interplanetary transport if you're content to just use some probes, using the same basic technology, investing little, if anything, in innovative propulsion methods, for example.
I guess it's lost on the two of you, so I have to draw you pictures:
The US space program didn't just start one day and head to the moon. First, we had to build rockets. Once that hurdle was covered, we then attached some funny little object on it called an artificial satellite. The satellite had some instruments on it that transmitted telemetry and other data back to earth, which was then further analyzed. After some more work, we started sending dogs and monkeys, not people into space to orbit the earth. Would a man have volunteered to go? I'm certain a few would have; however, our forefathers of the space program had the wisdom to proceed with caution. Once the animals experiments provided enough data, we then launched a man into space. Did he go straight to the moon? Nope. Instead, he orbited the earth, first for a few hours at a time which was incrementally extended into days. Once that was accomplished did we then push forward to land men on the moon and return them home. We also continued with the Skylab program to start practicing for longevity in space.
Then came the Shuttle program. It was heralded as a major leap in the Space program, but instead did not deliver what was promised (hundreds of launches, etc). The shuttle was still using mainframe computers, which are extremely heavy and bulky up until the early 1990's. Hell, it almost took an employee rebellion in NASA's younger engineers to get off of mainframe computers and to a client-server style network in the late-1990's.
Anyway, I'm not saying all we need to do is crawl. Look at what's going on in NASA right now. There are engineers with their own forum who are claiming that NASA is going about building the next stage in space faring vehicles all wrong. There is disagreement (on a large scale) how to build and equip a mission to Mars.
We've lost some know-how due to the last 30 years being vested in the shuttle program. We have to depend on the Russians to get supplies to the Space Station and are basically grounded once the shuttle fleet stops.
Testing new propulsion systems, is not something to be performed on such an ambitious voyage. This is what the crawl, walk, run phase is. No one can give any good reasons *WHY* we have to go to Mars beyond, "<snivel> THEY DID IT ON STAR TREK!!!" Real life doesn't work like that and I would think that a (reasonable) person would understand that.
I think what gets lost is that people do not remember how overly-optimistic scientists/mankind became during the nuclear age. Need I remind you that in the 1950's testimony before Congress was that within a few years, nuclear energy would give us electricity "too cheap to meter"? There were all of these bold, daring predictions what society and life in general would be like 10, 20, and 50 years down the road. I hate to break it to you, but very few, if any, panned out.
So yes, I'm going to state that we're better off buying cheap probes to gather data while efforts are underway to analyze that data. Look at the twin Mars rovers. Their life expectancy was 90-days, yet they're still operating. I know there are risks; however, I know from my observations of the Court of Public Opinion that efforts to pump BILLIONS of dollars into such a massive efforts will be greatly criticized. If the mission fails, get ready for the backlash. If the mission fails and people die, all hell *will* break loose.
I view the Space Program as an investment since many technologies have been developed because of it and as a result of it; however, where we are right now, a manned Mars mission isn't going to provide much, if any, ROI.
What's wrong with exercising patience? It's not like the planet is going anywhere.
