In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
This to me STRONGLY suggest that such probes need more time and funding
thrown at them in the future; if even for a few million dollars and a
extra month or so leading up to launch; looking at this, one can
certainly see a distinct downside to BFC in that these were all serious
problems that were being addressed at the last moment via lots of hard
work, sleepless nights, and just plain dumb luck.

Are you under the impression that such things never happened on the old
slower/costlier/worse projects? If so, you are sadly mistaken.

It's easy to say that a bit more money and time would fix these things,
but in practice, that's not what the money and time get used for -- they
get used to make the mission more ambitious instead.

The most telling argument against "more money would make these problems
go away" is that we have plenty of evidence that *it doesn't*.

I will not even comment on the idea to launch the probes before their
landing software was completed; and then uploading it to them in-flight...

There's nothing particularly wrong with that, if you think of software
uploads as routine practice rather than as a dire emergency measure.

or the extremely young average age (by engineering standards) of the
people involved in the MER program as shown in the special, after Dan
Goldin's scythe cut down all the old pros at NASA.

Most of the old pros have hit retirement age anyway. The problem goes
back much farther than Goldin -- it's a consequence of post-Apollo
contraction and the accompanying hiring freezes.

And actually, young is good. An unfortunately large fraction of the
middle-aged people at JPL, and NASA in general, are viewgraph engineers
whose net contribution to a fast-paced results-oriented project would be
negative. (If memory serves, the people picking the Mars Pathfinder team
carefully excluded them.)
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |