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> Rovers are great for low budget exploration, but if you want to kick things into high gear, there's no substitution for trained humans. But how many rovers

• codys 9y ago
  It's fairly hard to figure this out. What follows is a really bad comparison between Apollo & Curiosity, which completely ignores tech advancement, the difference between a moon flight and a mars flight, the length of time for each mission, the amount of data collected, and a whole lot of other stuff. The cost of Apollo program in 1973 was reported as ~$25 billion. In 2016 dollars, ~$135 billion. The Apollo program made 6 manned landings (I'm going to ignore non-landing missions as we're talking about rovers & consider them part of the development cost for the program). The curiosity mission was reported as costing $2.5 billion in 2011 ($2.6 billion in 2016 dollars). So with some really bad math (as noted earlier): - dollars per manned moon mission = 135/6 = 22.5 billion - dollars per unmanned mars mission = 2.6 billion - For the cost of 1 manned moon mission, we could have ~8 (22.5/2.6) unmanned mars missions.