New Delhi: A recent study analysing 90 NASA space missions since 1994 has revealed that the agency’s cheapest missions produce very few scientific discoveries compared to the more expensive ones.
The study, titled “Assessing scientific productivity of NASA’s space missions by cost” was presented in June at the International Planetary Probe Workshop conducted by the Planetary Society. The authors initially set out to understand the difference between cheaper space missions and expensive ones and whether several cheaper missions could have the same impact as a flagship mission.
They found that the most expensive missions led to the papers that were highly cited while missions that cost less than $100 million produced very few papers and often failed. For Ari Koeppel, a planetary geoscientist at the Planetary Society and lead author of the analysis, the bottom line is that discoveries in space are expensive.
“It requires really strong technological advances that I don’t think will be achieved through low-cost missions,” Koeppel, a policy and advocacy fellow supported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told Science.
The analysis also looked at the “time to science” of NASA missions, the time it took from the formation of a project to a breakthrough. What researchers found was that some of NASA’s biggest projects, which cost over a $1 billion and lead to some of the most significant breakthroughs, took a long time. Instead, the study highlighted that some of the mid-tier missions, which cost between $250 million and $750 million, are ideal for balancing cost, reliability, and speed. On an average, it took such missions about six years to show promising results.
This study comes at a time when NASA has been trying to reduce the cost of its missions but increase the frequency of launches. As a response NASA has begun several low-cost missions like ESCAPAGE, which in 2025 launched a pair of small spacecraft to Mars for a cost of $79 million. These are supposed to study the martian atmosphere and maybe even give researchers a clue about the scientific potential of low-cost missions.