Comment by nancyminusone
7 hours ago
For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"
Yes, but a big reason payloads cost so much is the need for extreme mass optimization, which is driven entirely by limitations in launch technology.
When launching large masses to high energies gets cheaper, payloads have a chance to get cheaper, too.
Not just mass optimization either. Intense effort and cost are expended through verification because a single payload simply must work. But using commodity hardware with reduced verification effort, launching many, and tolerating some amount of attrition has resulted in reduced costs for Starlink.
Testing of using commodity parts was part of the Mars helicopter and it worked well enough that making many of them seems plausible. I'd love to see multiple drones flying faster/further than rovers. Just not really sure what instruments would make them useful.
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So once Starship flies routinely could we mass produce rovers and launch them 30 at a time?
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It’s also sad as wasting $200B or even a few billion on a worthless acquisition is just an ordinary quarter for some large tech companies.
At least space exploration results in some valuable technology being developed, even if done in an extremely expensive manner.
0 to 1 is part of why the first Curiosity cost so much. If they kept the technology alive in practice, launching a new one every year doesn’t sound unreasonable.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
Likely a major limiting factor behind doing another Curiosity is plutonium-238 being scarce (it’s too big to rely on solar). Production was only restarted a few years ago: https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/programs/radioiso...
They issued statements like that... aaand then built a copy of the rover for the same cost as the original one. And it only took them 10 years to do this :)
Yeah, build-to-print at the small scale of space missions never really works in practice because requirements always change and small changes in requirements tend to have big design impacts.