As soon as you cross the Van Allen belt you're exposed to the full blast of the solar wind, and standard electronics start failing. You can reach orbit without

As soon as you cross the Van Allen belt you're exposed to the full blast of the solar wind, and standard electronics start failing. You can reach orbit without crossing this belt, so my understanding is that in low Earth orbit you're still shielded enough from the solar wind for it to not be a deal-breaker. Assuming that you're referring to the stories about the Mars rover, Mars isn't geologically active enough to have its own equivalent of Earth's Van Allen belt, so the Martian surface is directly blasted by radiation originating from the solar wind. Any computer hardware going there will almost certainly need to be radiation hardened. tl;dr: LEO != Mars