Mars rover sticker shock

Damon Hill wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote in
:

Ouch! Two billion dollars. That's around four times as much as the two
MER rovers:
http://tinyurl.com/3dhsnj

Or list price on a replacement B-2... (assembly line startup costs not
included)

--Damon, who'd rather have the rover

At this point, since we already have two rovers on the surface, another
MRO would seem more appropriate. We aren't even beginning to get the
kind of orbital coverage we need, and Mars is a huge planet.

MSL has been mismanaged from the get go, and both rovers have been
vastly underutilized because Steve Squyres is such an asshole geologist.
There things could be immediately pressed into astrobiological service
just by using the microscopic imagers every chance they get. Squyres
isn't and hasn't been doing a damn thing with those rovers, and in his
rush to get up that mountain he passed by many opportunities to image
up close and personal the multitude of blobula oozing out of that thing.

Then once he was up there for his vanity shots, he rushed right off it.

The best thing they could do for Mars science now is take him off it.