Well I know they've stated they won't be making a profit on Mars it's to gain faith that they are capable of producing a product en mass. That much they have stated in this thread before. I forget when and where, but it was obviously after Mars and Jupiter were announced. They weren't considering an FPGA before.

That said I'm also under the impression Mars is to raise funds for the ASIC development and that the first round of ASICs has no real profit as a lot is non-recurring engineering costs being covered. After that point they can lower pricing. The reward for those purchasing first is hopefully getting in whilst hashrate provides a strong return. Not too sure what happens with the sale price/ROI after that point, but then neither does anyone right now.

Also with respect to Litecoin mining, I was told the scrypt algorithms is larger and more complex than what is required for Bitcoin and requires very fast access to memory. It's not just the amount of memory, and they will be working on that.

In any case they also stated to bring the FPGA price down they need to sell 400 units, so economies of scale are a factor as well.

Anything more specific you will have to email them, but for sure it's economies of scale and the fact they want to build trust as opposed to profit on this first Mars device.