Quote:
Originally Posted by Tog_
Here was the question:
"How is it that 30 years ago we could do a soft touchdown on the Moon, but to land on Mars, they needed to wrap the craft in balloons?"
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Sounds like the "questioner" doesn't have a firm grasp of the history of unmanned spacecraft. 30 years ago the
Viking spacecraft performed a soft touchdown on Mars using the same "method" as the LMs.
The reason we have recently used "balloons" to soft land unmanned spacecraft on Mars is because it is
cheaper than soft landing by retro rockets.