Curiosity is also a unique tool of science. A business could approach this differently. A business doing this would drop several hundred of the same machine on

Curiosity is also a unique tool of science. A business could approach this differently. A business doing this would drop several hundred of the same machine on mars. If they were semi-autonomous like Curiosity and controlled from earth each one might get a dedicated driver instead of a team of scientists. A command might include placing location markers, flattening the surface between two markers, pick up dust inside a region and filtering it for some material. The driver would determine what tasks he needed to get done (probably from a jira ticket :( ) then would coordinate with other nearby drivers and even with high latency they could get decent throughput. It might even be that one driver might get several construction machines if the tasks were simple enough. If a machine breaks, the simply move it out of the way until a manned mission. It might also be that there could be a small team on the surface and a slightly larger team in orbit. The surface team could do maintenance and the team in orbit could control a small army of machines. These people could be rotated around or semi-permanent depending on the details of the work and the economics of this situation.