cmholm's Journal: How Hard Is It To Get To Mars, Really?

During the run up to the landing of the first Mars Exploration Rover, JPL and the mass media frequently batted around the crappy Mars mission success ratio, while ernestly proclaiming "Mars is hard to get to!". I guess it's be be expected that some ass covering was in order on the eve of a Mars landing, but still, I've gotta laugh. When they rattle off success/failure ratios, what they are doing is counting anything that mankind has ever had the vaguest intention of sending to Mars, and counting it as a failure if said object had not in fact flown-by/orbited/landed on Mars.

In fact, especially back in the '60's, getting into space was hard. Look at any of the mission timelines, like the Mars Scorecard, and you'll see that a good number of the "failures" were really failures to get off the ground at all, especially for the USSR. It didn't matter whether the goal was Earth orbit, the Moon, Venus, or Mars, a good number of those early rockets couldn't hold together long enough to get into space. Even then, the payloads often stopped working after they got into space, or if they worked, we didn't even get 'em in the general direction of the goal.

Let's use the Scorecard and see what really happened:

Launch failure: 8

NEO failure: 3

Payload F.U.B.A.R enroute: 5

Payload F.U.B.A.R Mars orbit: 6

Payload F.U.B.A.R. Mars landing: 5

Successful flyby: 3

Successful orbit: 9

Successful landing: 4

How good or bad the stats seem is a matter of definitions. If we ditch the launch and NEO failures as a cost of doing business in space, and most of which were back when you could still buy a Studebaker, the actual success rate for the Mars missions doesn't look quite so bad. In fact, if you cut the Russians out of the picture, it looks pretty damn good, which leaves the program managers for the Mars Climate Orbiter looking like even bigger retards than before.

What this tells us is that, given a reasonable budget which will allow proper planning and engineering, Mars isn't as difficult of a goal as one might have though. Most of the US failures since 1970 can trace their cause back to this: continual Congressional budget trimming, leading to corner-cutting at NASA.