5 MOST EXPENSIVE PROJECTS ON SPACE TRAVEL

1. Cassini-Huygens: $3.26 billion

Cassini-Huygens, U.S. European space mission to Saturn, launched on October

15, 1997. The mission consisted of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space
Administration’s (NASA’s) Cassini orbiter, which was the first space probe to
orbit Saturn, and the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, which landed
on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Cassini was named for the French astronomer
Gian Domenico Cassini, who discovered four of Saturn’s moons and the Cassini
division, a large gap in Saturn’s rings. Cassini drew its electric power from the
heat generated by the decay of 33 kg (73 pounds) of plutonium, the largest
amount of a radioactive element ever launched into space. Protesters had
claimed that an accident during launch or Cassini’s flyby of Earth could expose
Earth’s population to harmful plutonium dust and tried to block the launch with
a flurry of demonstrations and lawsuits, but NASA countered that the casks
encasing the plutonium were robust enough to survive any mishap. Cassini-
Huygens flew past Venus for a gravity assist in April 1998 and did the same
with Earth and Jupiter in August 1999 and December 2000, respectively.
During its flyby of Earth, Cassini’s spectrometer observed water on the surface
of the Moon; this data was later used in 2009 to confirm the Indian probe
Chandrayaan-1’s finding of small amounts of water on the lunar surface.

2. Mir Space Station: $4.2 billion

Mir, Soviet/Russian modular space station, the core module (base block) of
which was launched into Earth orbit by the U.S.S.R. in 1986. Over the next
decade additional modules were sent aloft on separate launch vehicles and
attached to the core unit, creating a large habitat that served as a versatile space
laboratory for more than 14 year Mir (Russian: “Peace” or “World”) was the
third generation of space stations developed by the Soviet Union. Its core
module resembled its simpler predecessors in the Salyut series but had
additional docking ports (a total of six) that accommodated not only a
succession of manned spacecraft and cargo ferries but also permanently
attached expansion modules equipped for scientific research.

3. New Horizons: $650 million

NASA successfully launches the New Horizons probe, beginning a 10-year

mission to Pluto and other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a little-studied band of
debris from the formation of the Solar System.According to the IAU, the
official society in charge of naming celestial bodies, New Horizons is in fact on
its way to a dwarf planet, as Pluto is not sufficiently larger than its Kuiper Belt
neighbours, namely the objects Haumea and make, to meet the definition of a
true planet.

4. International Space Station: $160 Billion

The International Space Station program is tied together by a complex set of
legal, political and financial agreements between the fifteen nations involved in
the project, governing ownership of the various components, rights to crewing
and utilization, and responsibilities for crew rotation and resupply of the
International Space Station. These agreements tie together the five space
agencies and their respective International Space Station programs and govern
how they interact with each other on a daily basis to maintain station operations,
from traffic control of spacecraft to and from the station, to utilization of space
and crew time. In March 2010, the International Space Station Program
Managers from each of the five partner agencies were presented with Aviation
Week's Laureate Award in the Space category,[1] and NASA's International
Space Station Program was awarded the 2009 Collier Trophy.
4.Space Shuttle Programme
The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried
out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which
accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from
1981 to 2011. Its official name, Space Transportation System (STS), was
taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the
only item funded for development.[1]

The Space Shuttle—composed of an orbiter launched with two reusable solid

rocket boosters and a disposable external fuel tank—carried up to eight
astronauts and up to 50,000 lb (23,000 kg) of payload into low Earth orbit
(LEO). When its mission was complete, the orbiter would re-enter the Earth's
atmosphere and land like a glider at either the Kennedy Space Centre or
Edwards Air Force Base.