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I mean the low bar is that they fly three robots to Mars and two of them land safely and one of them makes multiple flights on the surface of another world so i

I mean the low bar is that they fly three robots to Mars and two of them land safely and one of them makes multiple flights on the surface of another world so it’s a pretty high low bar!

sfifs 6y ago
I mean sure it's cool but I think the point is they've been so consistently spectacularly successful in blowing past mission objectives that it's a bit hard to imagine achieving this wasn't the "expected result" (maybe we can cut a bit of slack for Pathfinder/Sojourner which was the first complex mission after the Climate Orbiter debacle and over-delivered only 12x).
- StavrosK 6y ago
  The issue here is that there's a mismatch between the probability distribution and result. In reality, either the equipment will fail some time on entry/initialization and won't be able to complete any missions, or it will work for one and thus probably work for a hundred of them. If you promise one run and fail to complete it, it's a disappointment, but eh, it was a high-risk mission anyway. If you promise a hundred runs and fail to complete even one, you'll catch a ton of flak. If you promise one and complete a hundred, you're a hero. The math checks out that way, especially when one single mission is good enough to get the funding anyway. Everything else is literally a bonus, why promise ten when they're paying you for one?
  - sfifs 6y ago
    Yes - there's clearly an incentive misalignment in setting & communicating realistic mission risks & expectations which is not too surprising given the politics behind how NASA is funded. What happens over a period of time in any organization if you consistently under-commit & over-deliver is that people stop believing in your "official" under-committed number ("It's just on-paper") and start creating their own informal "realistic" expectations (which are possibly different across stake-holders) and start taking (possibly mis-aligned) decisions based on these. As you may imagine, such situations tend to blow up from time to time.

I mean the low bar is that they fly three robots to Mars and two of them land safely and one of them makes multiple flights on the surface of another world so it’s a pretty high low bar!

sfifs 6y ago

I mean sure it's cool but I think the point is they've been so consistently spectacularly successful in blowing past mission objectives that it's a bit hard to imagine achieving this wasn't the "expected result" (maybe we can cut a bit of slack for Pathfinder/Sojourner which was the first complex mission after the Climate Orbiter debacle and over-delivered only 12x).

StavrosK 6y ago
The issue here is that there's a mismatch between the probability distribution and result. In reality, either the equipment will fail some time on entry/initialization and won't be able to complete any missions, or it will work for one and thus probably work for a hundred of them. If you promise one run and fail to complete it, it's a disappointment, but eh, it was a high-risk mission anyway. If you promise a hundred runs and fail to complete even one, you'll catch a ton of flak. If you promise one and complete a hundred, you're a hero. The math checks out that way, especially when one single mission is good enough to get the funding anyway. Everything else is literally a bonus, why promise ten when they're paying you for one?
- sfifs 6y ago
  Yes - there's clearly an incentive misalignment in setting & communicating realistic mission risks & expectations which is not too surprising given the politics behind how NASA is funded. What happens over a period of time in any organization if you consistently under-commit & over-deliver is that people stop believing in your "official" under-committed number ("It's just on-paper") and start creating their own informal "realistic" expectations (which are possibly different across stake-holders) and start taking (possibly mis-aligned) decisions based on these. As you may imagine, such situations tend to blow up from time to time.