[juancampa]

This quote about New Horizons is puzzling

> 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.

[DiogenesKynikos]

How is that an outrageous figure?

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.

[juancampa]

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.