"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
The only big-budget long-span program semi-flop we have had was Galileo;
and its problems were as much due to a hurried redesign of its launch
method and trajectory as anything else, and it still got a lot of its
job done at Jupiter.
In comparison to this, our lower-cost fast timeline missions are running
around 50% as to success rate.

While agreeing with your main point, I also nominate MO as an expensive
project that wasted money by failing.