Comment Re:Way to compare apples to light bulbs (Score 1) 200
It is not true that "there have been many, many, many more attempts at Mars than missions that actually got there", see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Mars exploration splits into two eras, the cold war competition between the U.S. and Soviets - which the U.S. won hands-down, Yay Mariner! Yay Viking! - and the past couple of decades with the U.S. and other countries collaborating in various combinations.
During the cold war the U.S. had a track record of 8 successful missions versus 2 launch failures. During the recent couple of decades we've had 9 successes versus 3 diverse spacecraft failures. And many of those successes have been far beyond mission profiles. So the NASA Mars team is about 17 wins against 5 losses. This would be regarded as stunningly successful in any sport.
The Soviets in the early days had many launch failures that can't really be charged to the Mars missions themselves - and were about the reverse of the U.S. cold war ratio for those that did get to Mars. It was still a remarkable achievement for them to place any one of those missions in orbit.
There have also been about a half dozen non-NASA Mars missions during the past two decades. Two Russian missions unfortunately continued the trend of never leaving LEO. And now India is one-for-one. May they keep it up! Europe is one-for-two and Japan is zero-for-one. Talk about small number statistics, but that's 2 wins / 2 losses. Quite respectable. One hopes other nations join the fun.
In the aggregate this is a remarkable tally of successful missions considering Mars is never closer than 50 million kilometers or so. Anybody know the corresponding statistics for missions in LEO?