Your contribution to NASA's entire budget probably amounts to less money than you lose in your couch cushions every year.

That's a terrific idea. With Russia's saber rattling over US missile defense, aiming their missiles at Poland and other european countries, restarting 24/7 nuclear bomber patrols near the arctic... it seems like a terrific time for us to pump billions of US dollars into the Russian military industrial complex. GREAT idea.

Agreed, I enjoy discussing this stuff. I'm really hoping we'll see more and more planetary research in our lifetimes. Radiation hardening is a really interesting subject, search for Rad hard or you can find some basic info on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardened Here's an example Rad Hard space qualified CPU that I think was used in the Phoenix Lander and a few others. http://www.synova.com/proc/mg5.html It's a MIPS R3000 class CPU 10-15MHz, and $30k for a dev board. Yeehaw! The demand for this stuff is truly tiny and it must be tried and true, so that's where the expense is coming from. Seems like most of the Rad Hard CPUs are low power MIPS or PowerPC based architectures. As for the actual hardening it seems to be a combination of insulated packaging and fault tolerant logic design - lots of failover and error correction and 'voting logic'. Fun stuff.

My point was that with an annual budget of $17 Billion, it's hard to imagine nasa spending 1/5-1/4 of that on one deep space probe with an equivalent budget of what they were spending in the 60s. NASA had twice as much money or more to go around in the 60s ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_budget ) and they had alot fewer earth science & environmental research responsibilities than they do now. If you dont want to be a troll, you should read the actual budget before accusing them of spending their budget on management, PR & swimsuit models.. I prefer the hard numbers to histrionics and hyperbole. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/168652main_NASA_FY08_Budget_Request.pdf So for 2008 the total budget is $17.3 Billion $5.5 Billion for Science -- 1.5 Earth Science -- 1.0 Heliophysics -- 1.4 Planetary Science -- 1.6 Astrophysics $3.9 Billion for Exploration Systems -- 3.0 Constellation Systems (Orion) -- 0.85 Advanced Capabilities $0.55 Billion for Aeronautics Research $0.5 Billion for Cross Agency Support Programs (Education, Business Partnerships, etc.) $6.8 Billion for Exploration Capabilities -- $4.0 Space Shuttle -- $2.2 International Space Station -- $0.5 Space and Flight Support So if you really break it down the 1/3 of the budget is for hard science & research, 1/4 is for Orion/Next generation manned spaceflight, about 1/3 for existing manned spaceflight (shuttle & station) and the rest for education, etc. There isnt alot there to go around. And if this is all so important to you all, write to your senators. I for one think that $17 Billion for earth & planetary science & space exploration is a pretty sad pittance compared with our spending on same 40 years ago, and especially in light of our 3 Trillion dollar war in the middle east. We can spend all that money in Iraq & Afghanistan but people get their panties in a wad about spending any money on science & exploration. Sad.

But I think since we're in one-off land, it would cost nearly double and maybe more since the burden on the development team would be to create 2 one-off sets of qualified hardware and meaningful (enough for congress to agree to pay for it) mission profiles should both probes succeed and backup plans for either if one fails. The failure rate was alot higher in the 60s (3 out of 10 Mariners failed) but I'm guessing that all the backups and multi-craft mission profiles & logistics was probably where alot of the money was going. I have a relative involved with JPL who apparently to this day gets teased about the unit conversion related failure of the Mars Polar Orbiter as being a sign that NASA is sleeping on the job. In fact all of the mission specs from NASA clearly dictated use of metric units for the project but Lockheed effed up and used english units for a couple of things. Unfortunately NASA has taken most of the blame for this, but it was really a massive prime contractor mistake. Also should mention that the mission was $125 Million which is chump change compared to the old school probe missions.

Wanna know the primary reason why Pixar, ILM, Imageworks, Weta, etc use linux renderfarms? It's free and it was the most logical platform jump for all of the shops that started out with SGIs running irix. Not to mention all the other apps we rely on are either commercial or proprietary and supported by a significantly large team of engineers. Any open source stuff anyone uses is at the OS or utility level. We use gimp for quick and stupid stuff (like maya shelf icons), or launch Photoshop w/ emulation. Anyone doing serious paint work uses Photoshop on OSX. Anyone doing serious editing work uses Avid on windows or Final Cut Pro on OSX. It's not that linux is useless, it isnt. But alot of those open source 3d, editing, paint, audio apps are well, pretty much useless to the 'Pro'.