I don't think a Mars mission compares in any way to what most SV hackers do, whether they do it for profit (especially the ignoble kind, ad revenue) or for the common good (open source dev). Not just in scale and timeframe and budget, but in how the organization (or lack of organization in the case of many open source projects) operates.

Also, your application of the word "hacker" to their simply having to adopt to circumstance or be able to update priorities and approaches pretty much takes all the meaning out of the word, because your loose meaning pretty much applies to any endeavor, from business to war to parenting to love.