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A comment on NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s colossal. Parent comment

Re:NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s co... by Veedrac on Saturday June 24, 2023 @05:36PM (#36462866)
No, the point is that this constraint is dominantly a mass margin issue, and if NASA wasn't politically handicapped their mass margin would look very different.
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Re:NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s co... by idlewords on Saturday June 24, 2023 @08:50PM (#36464157)
Say I can send 1000 metric tons to Mars for a million bucks. How does that solve the problem of safely landing a heavy rocket on the surface?
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Re:NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag–and it’s co... by Veedrac on Sunday June 25, 2023 @07:18AM (#36467033)
NASA was broadly happy with technical feasibility for Red Dragon, which pretty much just repurposed Dragon 2's biprop abort motors to land >1 ton on Mars for their estimate of $150-190m/launch. They didn't go forward with it, but this was early 2010s so that's not much surprise.

With infinite mass in Mars orbit, you'd presumably want to scale up, but while this marginally hurts aerobraking performance, you have vastly more mass margin to just bring a bit more propellant.

If course, you'd probably still want to land something in scope of what you can launch from Earth dry in one flight, but for sure we're still talking >5 tons there, probably more like 10.

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