[somenameforme]

The unreasonably high price is because NASA is obligated by Congress to use Boeing and their SLS. It costs orders of magnitude greater than SpaceX for no benefit whatsoever, as a Falcon Heavy could absolutely be fitted for a lunar flyby if desired. Another problem is that rovers are way more limited than most people realize.

The fundamental problem is that moving parts break, so their design/behavior are very limited. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 16 limited activations. It then took a team of scientists around 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.

Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse.

Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.

[HPsquared]

Extremely constrained mass and volume budgets must cause a lot of difficulty. The drill and wheels, say, were engineered right to the limits to make them as compact and light as possible. A drill with twice the mass and size would probably be 10x as effective. Same with the wheels.

[boxfire]

It actually took only 9 months to work around, and the new method is actually quite effective. After fixing some early bugs it’s as effective as the original drill technique.

[somenameforme]

The drill started flaking out in early 2015, completely broke in December 2016, and was back online in May 2018. The new method works but is quite a lot riskier and less stable. Every activation increases the chance of a permanent failure. The same was obviously true before, but you just worsen the risk profile a bit. Of course a worse risk profile with drilling is way better than no drilling!

[noja]

Isn't SpaceX cheaper because NASA exists? Get rid of NASA the price will rocket.

[p_l]

They used a lot of NASA resources to bootstrap, makes sense they later lobbied to destroy them once they could do the expensive testing on their own