There's really no telling how good Ariane was here though, without a lot more information. Maybe if it was perfect it could have "tripled" the lifetime. Using

There's really no telling how good Ariane was here though, without a lot more information. Maybe if it was perfect it could have "tripled" the lifetime. Using your driving analogy, this is like you getting 80mpg on a car that needs to hit 40mpg or heads will roll. Maybe everyone driving it would get 80mpg. Maybe someone driving extremely precisely would get 120mpg. There's not enough information here to say how well Ariane did other than public comments from the engineers which were vague but positive.