It also ignores how Tesla promoted "autopilot". Until very recently tesla.com/autopilot just showed that a video saying the driver was only there for legal reasons. Yes maybe technically they meant FSD (for which it's also a lie, and which has a lying name as well) but they were definitely mixing the terms up themselves (and I think the video predated FSD)
The article mentions redundancy but doesn't specify what organization is claimed to make CSB redundant. I'm guessing it's the NIH since, to be fair, Vance announced an investigation into the East Palestine chemical spill five days ago: https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/nih-long-term-health-research...
> 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.
Right, but that budget is enough to pay 60+ $200k salaries. I'd imagine that New Horizons is mostly coasting and there isn't a lot of new data for long periods of time.
Looking at the mission website,[0] there are still a lot of people involved with the mission, spread across science, engineering, operations and management.
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.
Ingress pricing is indeed cheaper. POST is $0.005 per thousand requests on standard and $0.0025 on express one.
Egress and storage however are more expensive on express one than any other tier. For comparison, glacier (instant), standard and express are $0.004, $0.023 and $0.16 per GB. Although slight, standard tier also receives additional discounts above 50 TB.
