If you are honest with yourself, the JPL missions are often insanely expensive. The Curiosity rover was supposed to be 1.5 billion, but ended up 2.5 billion, a

If you are honest with yourself, the JPL missions are often insanely expensive. The Curiosity rover was supposed to be 1.5 billion, but ended up 2.5 billion, and the main explanation of that was 'to develop a new landing mechanism'. Ok, I guess. And now Perseverance is again 2.5 billion despite large parts of the rover, landing system and so on, were already 95% developed. Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance. Space Nerds bitch less about these programs since they at least are successful compared to the human part of NASA but if you really look at the achievement per $ its not that fantastic.