Re: ....Question? Have They Found a Reason to go 'To the Moon and Mars' Yet???

Ordover@xxxxxxx wrote in
news:1144492013.397069.281800@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:


820 Million, btw, is a heck of a lot less than the 500 -Billion-
projected for a manned mission to Mars. That's a factor of over
500 times less expensive.

$500 billion is a made up number, given undeserved credibility by
being repeated by the media. Dwayne Day did a good job of debunking
it in Space Review.

Okay, call it 250 billion.

How about not calling it anything until you've actually read Dwayne's
articles, which give a good historical survey of past Mars mission cost
estimates, ranging from $40 billion to $172.9 billion (highly dependent on
the assumptions and the extent of surface activity)?

On top of which, the rovers are a proven technology, now the
equivalent of off-the-shelf tech, while getting people to Mars and
back isn't. It is no longer necessary to design rovers from the
ground up, just tweak them a little, which will cut down on the cost
by a great deal.

How about not comparing apples (rovers) to orange groves (manned missions)?
All manned missions are inherently sample-return missions, while the rovers
are incapable of returning anything. The cost estimates for robotic sample
return are considerably higher than the rovers, ranging up to $8 billion
(especially if you limit the estimates to the more recent ones, which add
costly contamination-control measures).

--
JRF

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