[lukeboi]

While I don't agree with the anti-mars thesis of the article, I do think the article is hitting on something important: Robotic exploration is underrated.

Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?

[Ralfp]

Who would design and build experiments for those probes to run when they land on Mars? Are we sure economy of scale would apply to those?

[lukeboi]

I'm no expert but I don't think there's a shortage of experiments that people want to run on mars and the other solar system bodies, especially with sample return capabilities.

We've been launching things into low earth orbit for ~60 years and orbital launch demand still seems to outnumber supply. If we could get our martian surface payload capacity to even 1% of our LEO payload capacity I'm sure there would be many organizations that would want to send something.

[m4rtink]

Definitely! Just look at all the Cubesat payloads people fly these days - all of that only really possible by the cost of individual satellite mission coming down.

Before that one had to build and launch one big expensive satellite or beg another project to have their technology or experiment included on their mission, with a very limited number of available "slots".

[wnkrshm]

Partially, you can have lots of cheap instruments driving/flying/floating around to find something interesting to look at with the fewer expensive shots.