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Comment by nancyminusone | Hacker News Reader

For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"

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Yes, but a big reason payloads cost so much is the need for extreme mass optimization, which is driven entirely by limitations in launch technology.

When launching large masses to high energies gets cheaper, payloads have a chance to get cheaper, too.

Not just mass optimization either. Intense effort and cost are expended through verification because a single payload simply must work. But using commodity hardware with reduced verification effort, launching many, and tolerating some amount of attrition has resulted in reduced costs for Starlink.

So once Starship flies routinely could we mass produce rovers and launch them 30 at a time?

I think the question of technical possibility answers differently from the question of organizational feasibility. Starlink is optimizing costs because they have a financial incentive to do so. The less each satellite costs, and costs to maintain, the more income they make. I fear incentives are not so direct in governmental orgs. Outside contractors performing most of the work have outsized influence, and incentive to inflate costs. Budgetary decision makers all want to see investment in their own districts.

I think Starlink and cubesats have definitely proven the approach can reduce costs.

The engineering does not seem as challenging to me as figuring out how to get such a policy approved and pushed through all the administrative and decision making layers without watering down and budgetary inflation.

Maybe if we launched 30 Starships carrying 30 rovers each. With only 30 units, the prices would likely be similar to current commercial satellites, which are already built on standardized platforms.

I'd go even more radically low cost, and kit the first lander out with wifi, and a half dozen each of every commercially available robot dog, humanoid, and wheeled or tracked robot of any interest. Rumble in the Mars Robodome. Bit of publicity for the existing manufacturers who may be willing to pay for the privilege, and who will undoubtedly learn valuable things about how their designs fail and can be improved. And you figure out in one stroke if there's a COTS platform you can buy for $30k that gets you 80% of what you need. If any of them function for any period of time, you use them to prepare the space for future landings. Rinse, repeat. After a few iterations, you have a half dozen manufacturers with commercially produced platforms with a few strategic modifications to which you can bolt your science instruments.

All I can think about now is a bunch of e-waste littering Mars. At some point, other visitors will show up to investigate Mars and come to the conclusion that the Earthlings are just so trashy their trash even started filling another planet.

The surface of mars is roughly the size of Earth's dry landmass. They'd have to spend quite a lot of effort looking for it to find it. And at that point it'd probably look more like a treasure trove of useful thermoplastics, refined metals, magnets, and other useful things otherwise difficult or expensive to source on Mars directly.

man, you spent more time thinking about that than I expected anyone to actually do

I find that pessimism holds most of it's practitioners back from their full potential.

It's that very pessimism that allows me to be fulfilled in life not using social media, so I'm quite happy with it.

That's odd, because that kind of pessimism is all over social media and I'd think not using it would be an antidote. That and rage bait.

Testing of using commodity parts was part of the Mars helicopter and it worked well enough that making many of them seems plausible. I'd love to see multiple drones flying faster/further than rovers. Just not really sure what instruments would make them useful.

That's another great example. And ridesharing on the mission allowed them to prove it very inexpensively and with much lower risk than a dedicated mission.

I think if they had a big f-ing rocket at their disposal and could bundle a couple dozen of them MIRV style there would be no political downside if a bunch went splat so long as a bunch didn't

"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"

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.

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.

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...

It’s also sad as wasting $200B or even a few billion on a worthless acquisition is just an ordinary quarter for some large tech companies.

At least space exploration results in some valuable technology being developed, even if done in an extremely expensive manner.

Doing one-off robots is incredibly expensive. Building clones costs very little.

When I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Forging the part cost a few dollars.

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