So when a mission costing "HUNDREDS" of millions of dollars goes bust, it's seems immesurably huge.

Yes, people have a hard time evaluating such immense budgets.

There is also a qualitative difference. Grab someone off the street and ask him which mission costs more: a Boeing 601HP communications satellite or the Mars Pathfinder. The answer will likely be the Mars Pathfinder, when in fact the Pathfinder mission cost about $150M while construction and launch of a Boeing 601HP costs between $175M and $250M depending on customer-specified configuration.

Because the Pathfinder mission is unique it receives more media coverage, and rightly so. But we tend to believe that one-of-a-kind things are inherently more expensive than a similar commercial product.

People often apply personal budget principles to national finance. That is, we start out with a fixed amount of money each month. We allocate that fixed amount with the idea that if there is a cost overrun in some area of our budget, it will have to be compensated for by subtracting funds from some other area. When it comes to national finance, we fund we believe is worthwhile to fund, to the extent we believe it's worthwhile. There isn't as much compensatory shifting of allocation. The U.S. doesn't have a fixed income.

The entire Apollo project is estimated to have cost $30G in 1970 dollars. By comparison, funding for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was on the order of $75G per year during that time. Social aid is generally held up as the natural opponent of space exploration, but if we had not decided to spend the $30G on Apollo, don't think that HEW would have received a $30G budget increase.

Consider also the visible effects of funding. An STS orbiter costs about $2G. If NASA wanted another orbiter, it would have a very hard time selling the need for it to the American public. That's mostly because the $2G is concentrated into a single piece of machinery not much bigger than a Boeing 737.

But if it were announced that HEW's budget has been increased from $75G to $77G, people would see the figure, nod their heads, and then turn to the sports page without another thought. Another sobering thought: the war on terrorism is estimated to be costing us a billion dollars a day. We spent half a space shuttle yesterday, and most of us probably don't know what was accomplished with that money.

Because NASA deals with single pieces of equipment with enormous price tags, the public perceives NASA's spending differently than it does other kinds of government spending.

Then there's the difference between the perception of success and the perception of failure. Mars Pathfinder was an enormous success. We cheered for a few weeks and then went back to watching sitcoms. We never really thought, "Wow, the did all that on only $150 million."

But when another $150 million spacecraft plows into the surface, we lament for years about how $150 million was wasted for want of a little testing.

It's all perception. Goldin didn't correctly anticipate how the public would react, nor did he anticipate the difficulty contractors would have translating the new paradigm into a mode of operation.