The two orbiters cost US$217 million (at the time), which is about billion USD in year- dollars. The most expensive single part of the program was the lander's life-detection unit, which cost about 60 million then or million USD in year-dollars. Development of the Viking lander design cost US$357 million. 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. The experiments had to adhere to a special 1971 directive that mandated that no single failure shall stop the return of more than one experimenta difficult and expensive task for a device with over 40,000 parts.