re: Some Things You Overlooked
NASA has had a budget of roughly 14 billion dollars a year in constant dollars for 30 years and can't go as far as it did 30 years ago. You think this equates with not using some small piece of equipment used during the Apollo mission?
Oberg listed the reasons why Mars probes failed and made it quite clear that there is nothing mystical about getting to Mars. We simply didn't commit the time and resources to do it right. The difference in complexity between the early lunar missions and the Mars missions may be part of the reason. Robotic Mars missions are at an intermediate level of cost where their price tags are large to the voters yet not so large that skimping on engineering work can't cut costs significantly.
Regards,
Mark