But 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 l

But 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.