Remember that MSL was originally Mars 2005, then 2007, then 2009, then "Mars Smart Lander" and now "Mars Science Lab". Does this sort of baloney sound familiar? My guess is that MSL will eventually get canned like they canned Mars Sample Return after it got too complicated. If it was up to me, I'd terminate MSL today and go for mass produced MERs. Build them on an assembly line like Iridium satellites (Iridiums went for $10 million a pop). I'd like to send dozens of them to Mars. A big quarrel the planetary scientists have with the Mars program is it is too conservative. The engineers are not willing to send a spacecraft to an interesting place because the interesting places are almost always too dangerous to land at. However if we had twenty MER clones to play with then people could be aggressive about site selection. We could say up front that the landing sites are so risky that we expect about half the landers to auger in. However the survivors will land in such interesting places that the science returned will justify the losses.

Kamikazi MERs are the smart way to explore Mars!

Gary