“Aside from drilling deep boreholes what else could you possibly want? The panoramic and close up imaging is 90% of the mission.”

Scientists don’t want imaging, they want chemical analysis.

“Absurd. We all clearly saw the improvement in operations of the SO rovers. The deliberate pace has been highly beneficial.”

You don’t know the first thing about what I was talking about. We don’t have the bandwidth to receive the data from that many rovers and still continue with other missions. That is a fact.

?Baloney again, especially today with EELV launchers on line. I said similar missions, not identical. I’ll remind you the US has blown through several Mars launch opportunities launching nothing?

2 opportunities is not several. And don’t give me responses like absurd and boloney when you do know the first thing about spacecraft or launch vehicle engineering. Your manlove for the Stick discredits any thing you say.
EELV are more expensive than Delta II. MER even avoided Atlas II for cost reasons. And again, launch mass was not the only constraint. Similar does not cut it. The MER architecture was on the borderline for all resources. It was the max size for airbags. It was the max size for solar rover. Scientists wants other instruments than AXPS and imaging is not a priority.

Stick to playing with your little medical devices and leave space flight to the big boys who know something about it and have done something about it.

“I also believe that if NASA is incapable of running SLS successfully, they would be equally incapable of running an EELV-centric program successfully.”

Apples and oranges. It’s the difference between buying a F150 – or a fleet of them – off of the lot and designing your own dump truck in your garage. One design is established and in production – low risk. The other has all the risks of a new development program and a much larger scale to boot. And let’s not forget that MSFC has not developed a new launch vehicle in a whole generation; They lack current experience priming the development of new launch vehicles when compared to ULA.

I’m sorry to say that I have lost a lot of respect for Armstrong. Still a great man, but this is a stain on his record.

http://blog.al.com/space-news/2010/08/deputy_nasa_leader_lori_garver.html

“ Will somebody please help me understand the logic of orphaning the designs of Spirit and opportunity…”

I can’t speak to the technical merits, but I agree with your line of reasoning – reuse known designs.

I think this would be a wonderful strategy for exploring the Moon, where we could establish a dedicated production line of robotic explorers (1-2/year), and iterate based on feedback, fixes and new technology. Has to be kept on a tight budget and schedule, otherwise you lose the effectiveness of the feedback loop. Kind of along the lines of Agile software development.

Good thought.

How goes that Ares I cost justification your were working on?

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/axel-20090204.html

Aside from drilling deep boreholes what else could you possibly want? The panoramic and close up imaging is 90% of the mission.

b. There isn’t the bandwidth to handle that many rovers.

Absurd. We all clearly saw the improvement in operations of the SO rovers. The deliberate pace has been highly beneficial.

c. The MER design was specific to the 2003 opportunity, that occurs every 16 or so years. The combination of low C3 and low entry speed made for a design that could be launched by a Delta II and use the heat shield/airbags

Baloney again, especially today with EELV launchers on line. I said similar missions, not identical. I’ll remind you the US has blown through several Mars launch opportunities launching nothing.