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Look at all the Martian rovers. That is a notoriously hard environment to operate in, so success has often been defined as "the rover functions for at least 30
by CydeWeys 4y ago
Look at all the Martian rovers. That is a notoriously hard environment to operate in, so success has often been defined as "the rover functions for at least 30 days". And then some rovers ended up working for over a decade. That doesn't mean that every rover that didn't last an entire decade was a failure though! It just means that, regardless of whether you hit your main goal, if you still have something working left over at that point, of course you keep using it.
The main goal here was to clear the pad and get some atmospheric experience with the entire stack. Goal met. But of course they had contingency plans to get as much more experience with it as possible, if things continued to function nominally (as they have with some rovers, or indeed some previous first SpaceX test flights, like the Falcon Heavy).