To put the Mars landing in perspective...

[Locut0s]

46. SOURCES...

The quote that the mars rover cost $7 per person comes from one of the NASA officials ( Charles Erlachi I believe ) at the Mars landing press conference held right after the landing:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/curiosity-lands/

"The rover was subject to delays and cost overruns, eventually coming in at a total cost of $2.5 billion. During the press conference, NASA officials pointed out that this amount to roughly $7 per U.S. citizen"

I did my own calculations based on the published MSL cost and the US population and I got $8, but still that's about the same. As for the cost of the Iraq war per capita that's just the total war cost divided by the total US population:

Total cost of Iraq war: http://costofwar.com/ (I rounded it off to 805 billion)

Total US population: https://www.google.ca/search?q=us+population&rlz=1C1CHFX_enCA469CA469&sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 (I rounded it off to 311 million)

The facts about the number of casualties in the iraq war come from here: http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm

The estimates for the number of Iraqi casualties range anywhere from 50 to 600,000 so I posted a range of 100 to 500,000.