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> We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft…

The track record for successfully landing on Mars isn't that awesome:

> Historically, counting all missions by all countries, there has been about a 50% success rate at Mars — and the odds of successfully landing on Mars are only about 1 in 3.

* https://www.lpi.usra.edu/features/ala_msl/

That isn't a very useful statistic - all you should really glean from it is that landing on Mars is hard. The US has done it 9 out of the 10 times it tried, so it seems reasonable that it would succeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mars_landers

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