Great news about MAVEN. I hope this means a full, or nearly-full, recovery of previous function is now possible. Even if this can be managed, however, the case for providing duplicative capability remains.

Heh. Both, actually.

Affirmative on that “luck” thing. But I don’t think a reasonable exploration program should have to rely to that extent on luck.

NASA has delivered *quality* for science missions in the past, but it would sure help if commercial capabilities were better leveraged to deliver some more *quantity* in the years to come. So that we don’t have to depend quite so much on luck.

But as you say, SpaceX will surely be doing a lot to help resolve that problem where Mars is concerned.

“By the nature of their functioning, chat bots will tend toward regurgitation of conventional wisdom – blinkered and silly though it often be – because that is what tends to dominate its inputs from the Web.”

I’m a little confused. Were you talking about AI, or Progressives?

Affirmative on that “luck” thing. But I don’t think a reasonable exploration program should have to rely to that extent on luck.

“Mars is over-represented.”

It’s also a lot closer than all the competing worlds!

Even so, it isn’t necessarily any safer than most alternatives. MAVEN has been out there for 12 years. It’s planned nominal lifespan was 2 years. Credit to the great engineers who built her, but I think we should feel lucky she has lasted as long as she has.

Re: MAVEN, it could be both – a pressurant tank holed by some bit of cosmic flotsam.

Your notion for an inspection of MAVEN would be a potential objective for one of those regularly-scheduled Mars missions Mr. Richter urges upon us. To reference another of Robert’s recent posts here, it seems a lot of the tech – maybe even all – needed for such a mission has been recently demonstrated by that Impulse Space-Starfish Space collaboration on an autonomous rendezvous. I seem to recall that Impulse already intends to send its big Helios tug to Mars on the first launch of Relativity’s Terran-R – assuming that plan still holds in the wake of Relativity’s purchase by Eric Schmidt. If not, some other company with an upcoming launch vehicle of suitable, even if lesser, size might want to try something along the same lines using a smaller space tug. Maybe Rocket Lab’s Neutron or Firefly’s Eclipse.

Of course, as Robert notes, SpaceX intends to be sending actual armadas of Starships Mars-ward every synod starting in – most likely – 2029. At least one ship in each fleet could be detailed to deploy multiple spacecraft into one or more Mars orbits and then remain in orbit itself as a high-powered store-and-forward data link to Earth. A MAVEN inspection craft could certainly be included in the payload manifest for such a mission.

Steve Richter,

Robert is correct that all Grok can tell you is what it has gleaned from the Web. Anent Mars missions, that would, until quite recently, have included only the sort of NASA-centric stuff that entirely ignored SpaceX’s Mars plans. Artificial intelligence, unfortunately, has no way to compensate for the general stupidity of any given subset of its sources. By the nature of their functioning, chat bots will tend toward regurgitation of conventional wisdom – blinkered and silly though it often be – because that is what tends to dominate its inputs from the Web.

Jeff Wright,

Mars is over-represented. But that is a function of both scientific politics and NASA’s increasingly limited ability to undertake missions of any kind due to the declining quality of mission management – especially cost control. Fortunately, from 2029 onward, SpaceX will effectively be taking over the Mars portfolio. That should allow NASA to concentrate its own far more meager resources on other destinations – Titan certainly included. As to the general profligacy that has come to typify NASA unmanned science missions, one can only hope Jared Isaacman is able to end that on his watch.

Titan needs more love.

Steve Richter: To add to Blair Ivey’s comment, I would also say you should stop relying on Grok for this analysis. In this case it is giving poor information, mostly shaped by the propaganda of NASA officials and the scientists reliant on government money who are stuck in the old school way of doing things.

I just posted last week a long paper by the academic community, working with SpaceX, on its proposals for future Mars missions, based not on old NASA ideas using out-dated technology but on the new commercial rocketry being developed by the private sector (mostly but not exclusively SpaceX). This is where you should be getting your information, not some garbage-in-garbage-out fake AI bot.

It would be helpful to separate your commentary from that generated. We are interested in what you have to say, but need a way to tell when you are saying it.

Grok says the following on this subject:

There are proponents for a more regular cadence of NASA robotic missions to Mars, taking advantage of every synodic launch opportunity (approximately every 26 months).NASA’s own Mars Exploration Program released a long-term strategy in late 2024 that explicitly advocates for an “affordable, regular cadence of missions” with frequent opportunities every launch window.

This includes smaller, lower-cost missions to maintain momentum in exploration, supplemented by occasional larger ones. The goal is sustained robotic presence rather than sporadic flagships. While not every mission would necessarily be a full-scale rover like Curiosity or Perseverance, the strategy supports ongoing surface access (e.g., landers or rovers) alongside orbiters. This approach has backing within NASA’s planetary science division and aligns with community calls for higher-frequency missions to build scientific return over time.

Periodic missions using heritage technology would likely reduce costs over time, primarily by avoiding redundant research and development. The Perseverance rover (Mars 2020 mission) leveraged extensive “heritage hardware” from Curiosity—roughly 85% of its design mass reused the prior system’s engineering—which explicitly saved NASA time, money, and risk compared to a fully new design.

Although Perseverance’s total cost ended up similar to or slightly higher than Curiosity’s (~$2.7–2.9 billion vs. ~$2.5 billion) due to new instruments, sample-caching hardware, and the Ingenuity helicopter, the heritage approach kept development costs lower than starting from scratch. With a standardized platform for repeated missions (e.g., common chassis, entry/descent/landing systems, or mobility designs), future missions could see further savings through production efficiencies, shared testing, and reduced engineering hours—similar to how earlier twin rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) benefited from duplication. NASA’s push for smaller, more frequent missions in its recent strategy is partly motivated by making this cadence affordable through such reuse and simplification.