What does it cost to get a gram of mass to stationary Mars Orbit?

The question is:

Now what are the shipping charges to Mars? Recently India put a Mars Mission into transfer orbit for around $73,000,000. The launch costs were low due to the efficiencies India brings to every project, The ISRO Mars Orbiter named: Mangalyaan, set the standard for the minimum cost to injection into Mars orbits.

The Mangalyaan science package masses 15 kilograms or 15,000 grams. This means that the cost per gram to stationary orbit around Mars for the Mangalyaan is $4900/gram. Yes, you read that correctly: $4,900/gram. Think about this: a skittle candy weighs 1 gram on average, so the cost of a single skittle candy would be $4,900 US/gram.

To get your skittle candy to the surface of Mars would be even more expensive, that would include the cost of atmospheric de-acceleration devices like parachutes or cushioning systems and then take a percentage of the load that the skittle would take up.  The cost equation might look like:

((Mass of Skittle + ∑sum all of the other objects mass going to the surface of Mars)/Number of items)

The cost of getting from Mars Orbit to the surface of Mars will likely be expensive.  Unlike our Mars Orbital Computational and Storage Cloud, getting those sensors to Mars is going to be much more expensive, but the floor is $4800 US/Gram.

What does this mean?

Things will need to be produced on Mars using Mars Resources, what would the early production systems that grind and shape the Basalt rock on the planet Mars.  This would save money over shipping products from Earth.  What would this robot look like?  Let me see any of your diagrams about these robots.

So if you have robots constructing construction or sensor technologies, this means that they will need control from machine intelligence on orbit with input from Earth.  Much of the processing could be done on the Robot, but any extra items used in processing also require increase the costs, costs that could be used for improved frameworks, power systems and so forth.


The thought here is this: What does the Mars environment look after 20 years or 10 Holman transfer orbits?  What would happen if parts of the systems could be built using on Mars products?  Sensors, wheels, all have parts that could be constructed on Mars using remotely controlled robots that have autonomous features that also use the Azure Stack on orbit for control.