Editing Viking program (section)

==Financial cost of the Viking program==
The two orbiters cost US$217&nbsp;million at the time, which is about ${{Inflation|r=0|US-GDP|.217|1970}}&nbsp;billion in {{Inflation-year|US-GDP}} dollars.<ref name="marsmoney">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5Dy6z6DQDNoC&pg=PA68|title=Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program|last=McCurdy|first=Howard E.|date=2001|publisher=JHU Press|isbn=978-0-8018-6720-0|page=68}}</ref><ref name=":0" /> The most expensive single part of the program was the lander's life-detection unit, which cost about $60 million then or ${{Inflation|r=-2|US-GDP|60|1970}}&nbsp;million in {{Inflation-year|US-GDP}} dollars.<ref name=marsmoney/><ref name=":0" /> Development of the Viking lander design cost $357&nbsp;million.<ref name=marsmoney/> This was decades before NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" approach, and Viking needed to pioneer unprecedented technologies under national pressure brought on by the [[Cold War]] and the aftermath of the [[Space Race]], all under the prospect of possibly discovering extraterrestrial life for the first time.<ref name=marsmoney/> The experiments had to adhere to a special 1971 directive that mandated that no single failure shall stop the return of more than one experiment{{mdash}}a difficult and expensive task for a device with over 40,000 parts.<ref name=marsmoney/>

The Viking camera system cost $27.3&nbsp;million to develop, or about ${{Inflation|r=-2|US-GDP|27.3|1970}}&nbsp;million in {{Inflation-year|US-GDP}} dollars.<ref name=marsmoney/><ref name=":0" /> When the Imaging system design was completed, it was difficult to find anyone who could manufacture its advanced design.<ref name=marsmoney/> The program managers were later praised for fending off pressure to go with a simpler, less advanced imaging system, especially when the views rolled in.<ref name=marsmoney/> The program did however save some money by cutting out a third lander and reducing the number of experiments on the lander.<ref name=marsmoney/>

Overall NASA says that $1&nbsp;billion in 1970s dollars was spent on the program,<ref name="nssdc-viking1orbiter" /><ref name="space.com"/> which when inflation-adjusted to {{Inflation-year|US-GDP}} dollars is about ${{Inflation|r=0|US-GDP|1|1970}}&nbsp;billion.<ref name=":0">As the Viking program was a government expense, the inflation index of the United States [[Nominal GDP|Nominal Gross Domestic Product]] per capita is used for the inflation-adjusting calculation.</ref>