Skyskimmer":9371gd5w said:
They would have to be a little somethign more than an rc car. But I think you got somewhat of the right idea. If they get launch costs down by a factor of ten, all other componets in space flight can decrease on a simliar rate, as there's less cost of failure, less money saved in reduction of weight, and more oppourtunites to launch,
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Launch costs are only a small fraction of mission costs which are dominated by that of building spacecraft. They are rarely more than 30% of the mission and for space exploration missions can be as low as 10%. Even if mission costs were free they would not have that big an impact on overal cost.
An RC car on Mars sounds cheap. But by the time you have built one out of materials that can withstand the environment, systems that can operate under martian conditions, equipped with with useful instruments and communications and the neccessary computer hardware and software to operate semi-autonomously (simple RC won't work) it's no longer cheap.
You would end up with something like Sojourner, which was in the RC car size range and carried a minimum payload. That still cost $25 million. And it needed the $265 million Pathfinder mission to land it on Mars and allow it to communicate with Earth.
Return for the money has to be considered also. Sojourner carried an APX, a camera and measured the mechanical and electrical properties of the soil. It travel only 100 m and lasted 84 days. The MERs carry many more instruments, have travelled many km and lasted many years.
The question we need to ask is really: what missions are best carried out by micro rovers like Sojourner and which by larger ones like MER?