"Ed Kyle" wrote in news:1113695527.988635.317100
@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com:

For our $110 million spent on DART, we (the taxpayers)
probably got less than 6 hours of mission time. All
we may learn, it seems, is that bad control algorithms
cause propellant to deplete quickly.

- Ed Kyle


What we got is a great oppertunity to learn from our mistakes. We should
be able to go through telemetry and find out exactaly what part of the
control loop caused the excess propellent depeltion, and fix it. That's
exactly the point of experiments. If DART was designed to get some payload
to a satellite it would have been a total loss of the $110 million...but
since it gave us something to learn from, I'd consider it worth it (though
not necissarily a success).

Hopefully they'll try again (for maybe $60 million or so?) and have more
success.

Tom