Beagle 2 hitched a ride on Mars Express which was and still is a very successful low cost mission. It’s still orbiting Mars and being used for scientific research more than a decade into its mission.

The total cost including that decade of operations is about €300M (until 2013) – and less than 20 percent of that was spent on Beagle.

But that’s not even the whole story. Venus Express was heavily borrowing from Mars Express and did consequently cost substantially less (€85M vs €150M for launch and spacecraft, excluding subsequent operations and in the case of Mars Express also Beagle 2; total mission cost until its end in 2014 €220M).

Beagle 2 and the whole Mars Express mission was really put together on a shoestring budget. It’s more a demonstration that you can do a lot with a little, really, than anything else …

Other then that SpaceX has shown incredible process in their re-usability quest, the latest failed landing included. They have been on a steady march towards re-usability, without any major roadblocks (except the usual delays). There is nothing there that shows them hitting any kind of wall, actually.

The Apollo program is a remarkably direct and relevant example of throwing money at a problem resulting in a quicker solution. There is of course a limit, but we're well below that point now. And with our current rate of experimental launches, many employees won't even remain in the job long enough to experience more than one of them. Speeding the rate up could have exponential increases in productivity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29#Orion_Pr...

> The last SpaceX test rocket failed to land.

This is disingenous. The last SpaceX rocket successfully returned from suborbital flight onto the target landing site. They just underestimated the amount of hydraulic fluid needed to make a proper landing (but then again, they hit the barge anyway!). It's basicaly a 99% success with a minor error that was found and will be corrected.

Stupid failures always happen, but at this point we can definitely assume that yes, they have a reusable stage.

> The Beagle landed on Mars and was unresponsive.

The Beagle was the cheapest Mars mission ever (~50 million), and the investigation attributed the failure directly to not having enough money to do things properly. Again, dollars, not decades.

> The last SpaceX test rocket failed to land.

It was a test, an experiment; Musk was describing it as "50/50" beforehand. The mission achieved exactly what it was meant to do.

Sure, I guess the assumption is that those "dollars away" also include the money to run a whole lot of unmanned flights, a bunch of manned-but-risky flights and have some failures (hopefully of the unmanned kind) in the process of making the whole thing repeatable.