Robotic Space Missions

There's a bit of precedence for this with NASA missions:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_probe

You also have to compare NASA's incredible success rate to others in their field. In 2013, China's Yutu moon rover broke down in less than a month. In 2014, the ESA's Philae lander failed to launch its harpoons and fire the thruster necessary to attach the probe to the comet's surface, and ultimately bounced into a dark crater. In 2011, Russia's ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission to return a sample of Martian soil never got beyond low Earth orbit because of a rocket misfire.

Forget about going to Mars, making a probe riding these things will be much more interesting.

I dont think its the first time. Space explorations like this are always a hit or miss thing. And scientists said that it's even much cheaper to launch another project than attempt to retrieve it.

It's probably the former. It's been tried before, with Deep Space Two at mars - but didn't work.There's also a sense that if you're going to spend tons of money to send a once-in-a-generation probe to an outer planet, it has to work.

I think it’s very significant. Interplanetary navigation and retro propulsive soft landings are tricky to get right. Several recent lunar missions have failed and historically about half of missions to Mars crapped out. China is rapidly racking up a very solid track record with their lunar and now Mars landings. Also rovers are a significant step up in complexity and capability from static landers.The Long March 8 architecture looks like it’s suitable for adaptation for first stage recovery,

Discussed at the time (of the article):My $500M Mars rover mistake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452959 - Nov 2023 (343 comments)

"Feel free to keep right on arguing about why this is stupid and a waste of time until someone gets around to doing it"This is something HN does a lot. Always mystifies me, for a site based around a supposedly disruptive startup industry. Lots of little mental boxes in many of the conversations.EDIT- To be fair, the reason your proposal hasn't happened yet is that it's still very early days for space exploration. Satellites in Earth orbit are often like you describe, so

Rosetta did not fail. Rosetta achieved all its goals, and then some. Philae's landing failed, but they actually got quite a fair amount of data from it, too.This year, OSIRIS-REx is going to visit asteroid Bennu[0], and the exciting thing about it is that it's a sample return mission, i.e. the probe is going to head back & re-enter. RDV is in June/July, and touch down in December IIRC.Probes visiting "other worlds" is kind of difficult, but it has been d

For Russia Luna-25 mission is actually a step ahead. Both Mars-96 and Fobos-Grunt - missions launched after USSR dissolution - ended up in Pacific. Luna-25 at least successfully got itself to an orbit around the Moon.Of course this mission took years to prepare, and it's much better to launch probes to the Moon than shells to Kharkiv. At least failure of Luna-25 gives less to brag about for propagandists.