On a spring day in 1996, at their research center in the Maryland
countryside, representatives from the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) presented Administrator Daniel S.
Goldin of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
with a check for $3.6 million. Two and a half years earlier, APL
officials had agreed to develop a spacecraft capable of conducting
an asteroid rendezvous and to do so for slightly more than $122
million. This was a remarkably low sum for a spacecraft due to
conduct a planetary class mission. By contrast, the Mars Observer
spacecraft launched in 1992 for an orbital rendezvous with the red
planet had cost $479 million to develop, while the upcoming Cassini
mission to Saturn required a spacecraft whose total cost was
approaching $1.4 billion. In an Agency accustomed to cost overruns
on major missions, the promise to build a planetary-class
spacecraft for about $100 million seemed excessively optimistic.
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