They don't have to be though. Spirit and Opportunity entire project budget (including design, building, launching, and operating for 90 days) was 820M. Even with the mission extensions the total cost is < 1B. And a lot of things have changed since then. Launches are cheaper, tech has improved and some recent missions have proven that even CotS hardware can exceed expectations (see the helicopter).
I would love to see NASA do something like the CLPS but for Mars. They could pay for launch services (which are way cheaper now with F9 / NG), and help with EDL (using the same parachute + airbags thing that has worked before), and leave the rover parts to 3rd parties.
We could have universities join the competition, building the rovers, exploring CotS stuff, autonomous driving and so on. Lower stakes than the decadal big rovers (Curiosity & Perseverance), but also cool and useful to train the next generations of students. Hell, I bet even companies could enter the race, with Toyota / Tesla / whoever else supporting this effort.
That’s still 2 or 3 orders of magnitude too high. The top speed of the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers is around 45 millimeters per second.
For example, on Nasa's website it says this about Perseverance:
> This map view shows the route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has taken since its February 2021 landing at Jezero Crater to July 2024, when it took its “Cheyava Falls” sample. As of October 2024, the rover has driven over 30 kilometers (18.65 miles), and has collected 24 samples of rock and regolith as well as one air sample.
That's about 8.5km per year.
So I think they would have to land a new one pretty close.
Isn't it solar powered? So it could just keep moving in the right direction?
Human habitation on Mars is a pipe dream for oligarchs, most serious space people are more interested in extraterrestrial life and the history of the solar system.
A lot of people seem to think, hmm, we've been watching fictional people go to Mars since Buck Rogers; it must be pretty achievable. (Hint: it's not.)
It’s just the one oligarch in particular, isn’t it?
It would be neat to see different companies, schools, or nations come up with variations on the rovers that only need to support the common interface of passing materials to the lab for analysis.
You could even drop more labs and build a network of them and expanding the range of your little rover nodes.
Once you have a decent rover design sorted out you can work on mass producing it and achieving economies of scale.
Are either of the rockets mentioned capable of launching a payload to Mars? The Tesla was launched on a Heavy which is 3 F9s. While maybe cheaper than a Shuttle launch, it's still at least 3x the F9 you're suggesting
Anyway, in a CLPS type program you could also cover kickstage development, like some of the new companies are proposing. Impulse Space is working in that area, developing intermediary stages that can take payloads from LEO to GEO, TLI and TMI.
[1] - https://www.spacex.com/assets/media/Capabilities&Services.pd...
That said, it’s true that belief in fantasies can motivate people in powerful ways. All the old cathedrals in Europe are a testament to that.
The nuclear rovers are doing their assigned missions, and can go about 100m/day IIRC. So, 5000km trek to the pole would take about 50,000 days at 10d/km. Give or take a few thousand km. (It's a whole planet right?)
This is all Wikipedia level research and from memory.