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NASA's Europa Clipper Launch

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217 points belter | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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proee ◴[14 Oct 24 17:34 UTC] No.41839783[source]▶
Cost of the Europa Clipper program is around $4-5 billion. Can anyone in the industry shed some light on why these programs are so expensive?
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Analemma_ ◴[14 Oct 24 18:49 UTC] No.41840594[source]▶
On Earth, it's cost-efficient to build things with a reasonable "bathtub curve" failure rate because they can be repaired or (if a consumer product) replaced under warranty. Neither of these are an option in one-off space projects: everything has to be built to ~100% initial reliability, which makes everything much more expensive.

In theory falling launch costs will eventually mean maybe we can make space science missions more disposable so a loss from random failure is no big deal, but we're not quite there yet.

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1. mmooss ◴[15 Oct 24 02:14 UTC] No.41844274[source]▶
> In theory falling launch costs will eventually mean maybe we can make space science missions more disposable

Launch is less than ~10% of the cost.