Sure! I worked on the digital logic that connects the rover to one of the scientific instruments on board, specifically the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser

For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"

The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.

And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.

We've had 8 launches in the past 3 years, with only 10 in the combined 17 years before [1].

Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#2...

Some types of launches to some classes or orbits have gotten cheaper. Not all launches to all orbits. I don't know if any commercial launch services can even do planetary transfer orbits.

In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.

Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.

A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.

A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.

The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.

Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.

Probably has something to do with the recent anti-science movement that currently has our country and government in a chokehold.

The cost of launches has come down, but not the cost of Freemason actors and CGI.