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NASA tried "faster, better, cheaper". It didn't work out so well. Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander were two missions executed under the FBC regime. They
by ridgeguy 8y ago
NASA tried "faster, better, cheaper". It didn't work out so well.
Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander were two missions executed under the FBC regime. They failed, arguably due to underfunding that elevated risks. It's hard to say, because the statics are sparse.
I'm personally ok with paying taxes to fund missions at the level of, say, New Horizons (~$700 million over 15 years) or Cassini (>$3B).
- glandium 8y agoBut the point of a cheaper project that has more likelihood of failure is that you could try again. You can even learn from the previous failure to reduce the likelihood of failure on the second attempt. Plus, since you've done a lot of the development for the first mission, you probably can save a lot of time and money. But that's armchair space exploration engineering. I could be completely wrong in my assumptions. That being said, what is non compressible, though, is the time to get to where we need to go (Mars, Ryugu, or whatever else in space), and having to retry is a set back that can be counted in large number of years.
- _Tev 8y agoDon't forget that every "try again" adds 80-150M to the cost for new launch vehicle. SpaceX is starting to change this, but most of the NASA history / planning was done in context of high launch costs.