Comment by odyssey7
5 hours ago
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.