Many people still stick to a belief that the space industry is one of the most expensive spheres of our life. But are there facts to back up this claim? We have compared the costs of several dozen major space programs and historic missions to more down-to-earth projects, so that you could see for yourselves whether spaceflight is all that exorbitant.

All prices/expenses are inflation adjusted for 2020.

This small rocket by Russian startup Lin Industrial was designed to deliver up to 30 kg (66 lbs.) of science experiments to altitudes of up to 177 km (109 mi).

Includes development, production and launch costs. Launched in 2014.

The rocket is built and launched by the New-Zealand subsidiary of US company Rocket Lab. It is capable of delivering 225 kg payloads to low Earth orbit and up to 150 kg payloads to Sun-synchronous orbit.

The rocket built by Russian startup Lin Industrial was designed to launch 65 kg payloads to low Earth orbit and 25 kg payloads to Sun-synchronous.

The rocket is capable of delivering 8.25 tons of payload to low Earth orbit. To deliver up to 4.9 tons to Sun-synchronous and geostationary orbits it is equipped with an upper stage, bringing up the total launch cost to $48.5 million.

This launch vehicle configured with a reusable first stage is capable of delivering over 16 tons of payload to low Earth orbit and around 6 tons to geotransfer orbit.

The Chandrayaan-1 orbiter confirmed massive deposits of water ice at the Moon’s poles and estimated its total volume.

This was the first Russian interplanetary mission since the failed Mars-96 (1996) and the second Russian interplanetary mission since the fall of the USSR. Unfortunately, the mission also ended in a failure, becoming stranded in parking orbit around the Earth after the Earth departure burn had failed. A burst of cosmic radiation was blamed for the malfunction of the craft’s onboard electronics. Fobos Grunt would have become the first-ever mission to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos.

This became India’s first-ever mission to Mars and the first time a space agency managed to send a successful mission to the Red Planet at first attempt. With the initial operating life time of only 6 months, the spacecraft has been active in orbit around Mars for 5 years now.

This became the first privately funded lunar mission as well as the first lunar mission by an Israeli spacecraft. Despite a failed landing attempt due to a malfunctioning braking engine, the mission was deemed a partial success. The spacecraft was designed, built and operated by SpaceIL, a private Israeli space startup. The complex has announced plans for more complex space missions in the future, including delivering commercial payloads to the Moon.

CHEOPS is a space-based telescope mission to search for new exoplanets and study them, launched in December 2019.

This was India’s second lunar mission and the nation’s first attempt to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface. The mission consisted of an orbiter, a lander and a small rover. The landing attempt failed in September 2019, but the orbiter continues to operate in lunar orbit, delivering important science data.

This was the first ever mission to return samples of asteroid material for study on Earth. Hayabusa returned around 1,500 microscopic grains of regolith that it had collected on Itokawa. Research showed that the particles had lain untouched on the asteroid’s surface for about 8 million years. Itokawa was also found to have once been a part of a larger asteroid. Its elemental composition was determined to be close to that of S-class asteroids.

This was Europe’s first Moon mission. Conceived as a technology demonstrator, the mission featured ion drive thrusters. Smart 1 mapped the lunar surface in high detail, including potential landing sites for future missions. Data collected by the mission have spawned 80 science publications.

CryoSat-2 is a European research satellite that studies Earth’s polar caps using an infrared scanner and radar from a polar orbit. The spacecraft has exceeded its planned three-year primary mission and continues to measure thickness variations of polar ice. Data collected by CryoSat-2 help study the effects of global warming.

Chang’e 1 was China’s first moonshot and it was a success. The Chinese orbiter conducted microwave remote sensing of the Moon. The data it gathered were used to create a 3D map of the Moon that was used to scout out landing sites for subsequent robotic missions. Chang’e 1 returned a whopping 1.37 Tb of science data.

Having been orbiting Mars for 16 years, Mars Express is now officially the oldest active spacecraft in an orbit around another planet. It has contributed greatly to Mars science by detecting aerosols and methane (a possible sign of biological activity) in the Martian atmosphere. Measurements by Mars Express were used to create a 3D model of Mars. The craft’s onboard radar discovered a subterranean lake underneath the south polar cap of Mars.

Venus Express was a European orbiter mission that made an in-depth survey of Venusian atmospheric processes. Venus Express discovered that Venus used to be covered by oceans in its ancient past. The mission also detected frequent thunderstorms on our sister planet as well as a massive atmospheric vortex near the planet’s south pole.

The early version of this rocket was capable of delivering up to 10.45 tons of payload to low Earth orbit and 4.54 tons to geostationary, at a single launch cost of $54–59,5 mln. It was later refurbished as the world’s first rocket with a reusable first stage. According to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the refurbishment cost around $1 billion.

Using its onboard spectrometers as well as the gamma- and neutron detectors the spacecraft determined the elemental composition of two asteroids that have been preserved in nearly pristine condition since the formative era of the Solar System. Dawn was the first interplanetary spacecraft to orbit two celestial bodies during one mission. It has snapped over 88,000 images of dwarf planets Vesta, Ceres and asteroids in over 10 years of operation. The spacecraft was also used as a testbed for ion engines that it employed to gain over 10 km/s of delta-V.

GOCE was a European satellite that measured the shape of geoid (Earth’s true shape) with an accuracy of 1–2 cm as well as Earth’s gravity field anomalies with an accuracy of 1 mGal. In order to do this the spacecraft was equipped with accelerometers 100 times more precise than any space flown accelerometers.

The construction of the Soyuz launch pad allowed Arianespace to span the gap between the light Vega rocket and the heavy-duty Ariane 5. The pad has hosted a total of 21 launches since 2011, including several satellites for the European global positioning system Galileo, as well as O3b, OneWeb constellations and other commercial payloads.

The cargo version of the Dragon capsule has been used since 2010 to ferry around 42 tons of payload to the International Space Station and returned over 30 tons of science and technology experiments. Dragon’s ability to return payloads from orbit distinguishes it from other cargo spacecraft. Only the Russian Soyuz spacecraft has a very limited payload return capacity of just 65 kg, with 3 crewmembers onboard.

MAVEN is a NASA Mars orbiting mission. The mission has determined that Mars used to be a warmer planet for a longer period in its history. It was also found that Mars loses its atmosphere to space nearly 10 times faster when it is in the farthest point of its orbit (aphelion), but the average leak rate is relatively small at just over 2,000 tons per year.

COBE was a NASA cosmology mission to study the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe. This radiation is evidence of the Big Bang. The satellite found the background radiation to be anisotropic (having different values in different directions). Two US physicists were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006 for their discovery of cosmic anisotropy based on COBE findings. Interestingly, processing of the data acquired during the mission accounts for 63% of the total mission cost ($544 million).

This is the first mission to study the dwarf planet Pluto from a flyby trajectory. The mission’s data changed our understanding of Pluto, its satellites as well as trans-Neptunian objects in the Kuiper belt. Images obtained by the craft’s onboard cameras showed Pluto and its moon Charon up close for the first time.

The observatory helped create the most highly detailed map of cosmic background radiation at the time. The spacecraft also measured the Hubble constant with high accuracy, as well as the proportion of dark matter and dark energy in the total mass of the universe, which was a major step forward in our understanding of these elusive phenomena.

OSIRIS-REx is a NASA asteroid sample return mission launched to study near-Earth asteroid Bennu. The sampling attempt will take place sometime in 2020. The spacecraft will store the samples of asteroid surface material onboard and head home in March 2021, with reentry scheduled for September 2023. OSIRIS-REx is expected to give us a new insight into asteroids in the so-called Apollo group. The mission’s findings are not merely of scientific interest, as Apollos and Bennu itself are on the list of potentially hazardous objects that can make dangerously close approaches to Earth.

Apart from becoming major off-world celebs (especially, Oppy), both MER rovers have found evidence of favorable conditions for life to exist on Mars in the distant past. Finding minerals such as hematite, gypsum as well as erosion on rocks was evidence that liquid water once flowed on the surface of Mars. The rovers photographed swirling dust devils, Martian sunsets and even a transit of the potato-shaped Martian moon Phobos across the Sun. Spirit and Opportunity have had a total operating life of 20.5 years for both rovers, having driven a whopping 53 km across Martian plains.

Vega is capable of putting small payloads of up to 2.5 tons into polar and low Earth orbits. There have been 15 Vega launches since 2012.

A mission to study Jupiter with the primary goal of revealing the story of the gas giant’s formation and evolution.

The first launch is currently planned for 2022. India also has plans to build a small orbiting outpost.

Ulysses was a joint ESA-NASA mission to study the Sun. The spacecraft was placed in an exotic near-polar orbit around the Sun that is canted at 80 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic (where all major planets and asteroids have their orbits). This made it possible to survey the whole surface of the Sun and the near-solar environment. Ulysses exceeded its operational lifetime more than four times, returning a plethora of unique data on solar dynamics.

Placed in a highly elliptical geocentric orbit, this infrared observatory has conducted over 26 thousand observations of the sky. ISO has detected the presence of water in starforming regions, planet formation around old stars, found hydrogen fluoride in interstellar gas clouds for the first time, observed the most luminous object in the Universe known as Arp 220 — and much more.

COSPAS-SARSAT is a satellite-aided search-and-rescue initiative. An estimated 50,000 persons have been rescued with the aid of this program, which equals the economic effect of $200 billion. Optimized search-and-rescue efforts made the system cost-effective as early as 1990–1999. The total cost effectiveness in 2000–2009 topped the total program costs by 2.7 times. This was made possible due to the COSPAS-SARSAT equipment being installed as rideshare payloads on various other satellites, such as GPS and Galileo navigation global navigation systems.

The largest infrared telescope ever launched, Herschel was equipped with a 3.5-meter mirror and carried a suite of far millimeter and submillimeter wavebands. Herschel detected traces of water vapor on dwarf planet Ceres, linked water molecules on Jupiter to the Shoemakers-Levy comet that collided with the gas giant in 1994. The observatory was also instrumental in discovering a new step in starforming.

The Automated Transfer Vehicle was an expendable cargo vehicle used by the European Space Agency to transport payloads to the International Space Station in 2008–2014. A total of 5 spacecraft have flown, delivering a total of 31.5 tons of supplies to the space station, including 19.5 tons of propellant. The ATV spacecraft served as the basis for the European-built service module of NASA’s Orion spacecraft that will return humans to the Moon in the 2020s.

Curiosity is a heavy-duty third-generation NASA rover designed to investigate Mars’ past climate conditions as well as search for evidence of life on Mars in the past or present. The 900 kg (1,982 lb) rover was sent to explore Gale crater, where conditions were postulated to have been favorable for microbial life when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface. NASA gave the general public the opportunity to send their names to Mars on board Curiosity, etched onto a silicon chip attached to the rover’s deck. More than 1.2 million people now have their names stored for posterity inside Gale crater. A modified version of the rover’s chassis was used to build the next NASA rover, currently set to launch in July-August 2020.

Shenzhou is China’s manned spaceflight program that put the first Chinese citizen, Yan Liwei, in space in 2003. This program gave China an independent manned spaceflight capability. 6 spacecraft were launched between 1999 and 2005, including 2 piloted missions, sending 3 taikonauts to orbit.

The Voyagers became the third and the fourth spacecraft (after Pioneer 10 and 11) to reach gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune. Both spacecraft have collected a treasure trove of science data on the outer planets, discovering 24 previously unknown moons in the giant planets’ systems.

The orbiter has completed 25 missions over the course of 19-year career, including a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, ISS foundation and construction as well as delivering the last module of the US segment.

The Cassini spacecraft has made a total of 162 flybys of Saturn, its rings and moons, having acquired 453,048 images and 635 gigabytes of science data, which were used in 3,948 science publications. Cassini has found evidence of a subsurface ocean of liquid water on Enceladus, 3 liquid methane seas and hundreds of lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan. Huygens was a small probe launched off the main spacecraft that successfully landed on Titan. It was the first ever landing in the outer Solar System and the farthest landing from Earth, returning the first surface images of Titan from a whopping 1.5 billion kilometers away.

During 15 years of operation more than 23,000 science experiments were conducted on the Mir station, including experimental plant and flower growth. The program has set a number of record firsts, including the longest continuous stay in space for 437.5 days (over 14 months) during one trip set by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1994, which still stands to this day.

According to ESA, Galileo’s economic efficiency is estimated to be €70 billion through 2020, an order of magnitude greater than the construction cost of just €7 billion.

Slated for launch in 2021, JWST will enable a wide range of cosmology-related investigations, including observing the formation of the first galaxies.

Despite the early technical setbacks, the Hubble Space Telescope has been an unprecedented success. During its three decades of operation (a record-breaking feat in and of itself!), Hubble has conducted a staggering 1 million observations of numerous space objects, including stars, galaxies and planets in our Solar System. It has enabled astronomers to peek deeper into the early stages of galactic evolution, essentially being used as a sort of ‘time machine’ to ‘travel back in time’ to explore the early Universe at less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Hubble-collected data spawn over 900 science papers each year.

Skylab was the only fully US-built and owned orbital outpost. It hosted three three-man expeditions in 1973–74. It was used for research in life sciences and engineering experiments, as well as for solar, Earth and astronomy observations. Skylab still remains the space station with the largest habitation module by diameter (6.6 meters) as it was built from a spare third S-IVB stage of the enormous Saturn V rocket. After the last mission departed in 1974, the 77-ton station remained in automatic mode. Unfortunately, with the Shuttle not yet available to boost its orbit, Skylab began to experience significant atmospheric drag caused by solar activity, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere in 1979.

The Russian Federal Space Program 2016–2025 envisages sending a robotic lander to Mars as well as launch 3 lunar missions, at least 15 Earth observation missions, 17 communication satellite, as well as maintaining the Russian segment of the ISS. Two modules are planned to be added to the Russian segment. Roscosmos has already launched 1 space-based observatory and 1 Mars orbiter jointly operated with ESA.

Both the SLS and the Orion programs have been criticized for budget overruns and low cost-effectiveness. Yet we should keep in mind that they form the backbone for humanity’s return to the Moon and later heading on to Mars.

Apart from its huge cultural impact, Apollo has returned the biggest amount of extra-terrestrial material to Earth: 382 kg of lunar regolith and rocks from six landing sites are still studied by scientists nearly half a century after they had been collected. In fact, a new portion of lunar rocks brought by Apollo 17, were unpacked for the first time in 2019! The Apollo program has had a significant impact here on Earth, too, having spawned more than 1,800 spin-off technologies and products and returning10 bucks on every dollar spent.

The ISS has been visited by more than 400 astronauts and cosmonauts since its inception; the crews have dedicated 110 man-hours to the outpost construction and maintenance and have conducted a total of nearly 2,000 science experiments.

The initial Russian lunar program cost was estimated to be around $98.4 billion dollars in 2014. The program would include a piloted lunar fly-round mission by a Russian spacecraft in 2028 and a lunar landing in 2030. Construction of a lunar base was planned for 2033. Routine lunar missions would commence in 2038 and occur 2–3 times a year. The program never got approved. Roscosmos has since been developing an alternative lunar program, which is likely to be a lot cheaper than its predecessor.

Leaving aside the huge cultural impact of the Apollo program, 135 Space Shuttle missions have accumulated over 3.5 years in orbit and have flown to orbit 355 astronauts (848 including astronauts who have been on several missions), including 306 men and 49 women from 16 nations. During their 30 years of operation the orbiters delivered nearly 1,600 tons of payloads, including 87% of the International Space Station.

Interestingly, at the peak of the Apollo program in 1966, NASA’s budget reached $48 billion (2020 dollars) — more than 2 times what it is receiving now. Basically, a lack of funding has been the main reason NASA is still struggling to put together a post-Apollo human lunar exploration program and has not yet been capable of sending humans to Mars.

Summary

If you have patiently browsed through this long list, you might be now getting an impression that space is expensive and that the money allocated to space programs might be better spent elsewhere. But this is far from true. NASA’s current budget in terms of per capita funding is a mere $70 per US citizen. Roscosmos’ per capita funding is even less, at a symbolic $12 (around 760 rubles) per Russian citizen. But this rather meagre money buys us more than just a satisfaction of scientific curiosity in regard to Earth, our Solar System and the Universe in general. Space engineering enables us to look for ways to protect our home world and ourselves from ever-looming space threats, such as near-Earth asteroids and rogue comets. No less importantly, spaceflight is a limitless source of inspiration for the young and the old alike (did you know that the number of students and post-graduates in the US doubled during the Apollo era?). In the long run, committing to space exploration is our only way to find ourselves a new home in the endless realms of cosmos, thus bringing us one step closer to achieving immortality.