[cgriswald]

I saw a lot of people complaining online about the cost of New Horizons. I took the time to explain that if we had foregone a single aircraft carrier, we could have sent nearly 20 such missions to Pluto. And that was just for the carrier, not for the support craft, aircraft, etc.

A carrier costs roughly $12 billion, and costs about $1.5 billion per year in operational costs.

People really have no concept of how much NASA costs. They think NASA gets an insane amount of money. We'd have moon bases and maybe even a Mars base if NASA got the funding people think they get.