"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?"
Thirty years ago, the highly successful Vikings landed on Mars with rockets. No balloons.
It went on to say that it seems like the balloon thing was a much better idea, and that there was no reason that people couldn;t survive a landing like the Mars Rovers did.
The
airbag rovers experienced something between 20 and 50 Gs at landing. (edit - see Mak's post below) Sojourner rover experienced around 20 Gs at landing. If he doesn't care what shape the crew is in, yeah, they'd likely
survive it...
And the three rovers to date were much lighter than any manned vehicle.
I didn't say it was good, just new.
Ask this expert if he can understand that there
might be more than one way to land on Mars. (In fact yet another, and entirely new, "skycrane" approach will be used for the upcoming MSL-09 rover.)
And remind him that
Hollywood's spacecraft designers don't have to answer to the laws of physics.