Test and Trace has much larger budget than Mars Determination expedition

A post shared more than 1,000 times on Facebook claims that the NHS Test and Trace scheme cost 10 times more than NASA’s latest mission to Mars. The post appears to be a screenshot of a tweet by a sports journalist. 

The text reads: “Actually can’t believe that Test and Trace cost 10 times more than the mission to Mars – and that of the two ventures, sending a robot to a planet 128 million miles away was the only one that worked.”

These are obviously two very different programmes with very different aims. That said, Test and Trace is budgeted to be significantly more expensive than the Mars expedition. The Mars Perseverance rover is expected to cost just under £2 billion, while NHS Test and Trace received a £22 billion budget for its first year. But Test and Trace has probably not yet spent all this money—meaning it does not currently cost ten times more.

How much does Test and Trace cost?

Test and Trace was allocated a budget of £22 billion by the government for its first year. This covers the programme in England, as well as contributing other resources like Covid-19 test labs to other UK nations.

However, not all of this budget has been spent. So far, we only have figures up to 31 October 2020, which show that about £4 billion was spent rather than the £6 billion that was expected. This just covers roughly the first six months of Test and Trace. The National Audit Office said Test and Trace was projected to spend roughly £11 billion between October 2020 and March 2021, but we do not yet have updated figures to confirm what was spent.

It’s also important to note that the majority of the funding given to Test and Trace is spent on Covid-19 testing, with a far smaller amount being spent on contact tracing. Of the £22 billion allocated to the programme in 2020/21, £1.3 billion is for contact tracing.

We don’t know how much has been spent on the scheme since the start of November, or how much will be spent in the future. It has been allocated a further £15 billion for next year.

How much does the Mars Perseverance rover cost?

Research from The Planetary Society reports that NASA expects to spend $2.7 billion on the Perseverance rover—about £1.92 billion. This includes the cost of developing the spacecraft, its launch and operating it for two years.

According to Forbes it is the seventh most expensive spacecraft in the history of NASA’s planetary exploration programme. 

This $2.7 billion figure doesn’t include the cost of the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter which landed on the red planet alongside the rover, which was funded separately and cost about $85 billion (£60 billion). 

Do they ‘work’?

The Mars Perseverance rover landed successfully on Mars on 18 February and has been sending back footage and audio recordings from the planet.

However, this is not all the rover is designed to do. NASA has said it will analyse the geology and climate of Mars, as well as searching for signs that microbial life may have lived on the planet billions of years ago and collecting rock core samples in metal tubes that can be retrieved by future missions. Although this work is underway, it may be too soon to declare the mission has categorically “worked”.

And while Mars is far away it’s in fact usually further than “128 million miles away”. The distance between Mars and the Earth changes as they orbit, but NASA said the average distance is 140 million miles away.

Whether or not Test and Trace has worked is a matter of opinion and debate, which can be assessed in many different ways. It is difficult to be sure how much the programme has reduced the spread of Covid. However, we do know that increased testing has benefits, such as determining whether people have Covid-19 and need to self-isolate and generating data to inform government decisions.

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