In article , Dan DeConinck wrote:

The cost of one manned mission to Mars ($400.00 B ) is equivalent to a
thousand robotic missions.( $0.40 B) We could put dozens of scientific

Except that isn't the cost of one manned mission to Mars. The cost of
one manned mission to Mars is likely in the $40B ballpark, with
subsequent missions being in the $4B range.

(Arbitrary moment - I doubled the Mars Direct reference figure. It's a
little less than, I believe, the Mars Reference Mission sits at... but
it's probably in the right order of magnitude)

Now remember, I concede that the astronauts would be more effect than the
robots but the problem is that they would be marginally more effective for a
disproportionate cost to the tune of five hundred times less scientific
returns.

Let's assume, hmm, three manned landings; call it $50bn. Will three
manned landings beat the science return of a hundred probes? Probably
not. Will they provide significantly different scientific return? Almost
certainly. We'll get, at a conservative guess, fifteen hundred man-hours
of surface work, actual field geology [1]; over a hundred and seventy
thousand man-hours of data on partial-g environments, on working and
living in them. It's quite hard to do that with what is, essentially, a
teleoperated poking stick.

Going to Mars many not be the smartest use of the manned-exploration
budget, and getting NASA to do it is - at best - another level of
inefficiency [2]. But it's not completely worthless, and there are good
reasons for it, good things that will be done.

[1] assumption - 600 day nominal stay, 2 crew each day doing 4hr/day
surface work - 4800 hrs/mission. The .3-g duration is 4 crew, 4-hr, 600
days. Three missions? It's unlikely to be cancelled *too* quick :-)

[2] At worst, it's a criminal waste of the US taxpayers money. YMMV.

--
-Andrew Gray