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They never said the helicopter would break down after 5 flights. They said it was designed for 5 flights. Shipping it to Mars is expensive and slow, so they bui

They never said the helicopter would break down after 5 flights. They said it was designed for 5 flights. Shipping it to Mars is expensive and slow, so they build in a lot of margin to increase the odds that they meet the requirements. Take a much more common example: expiration dates. A product going bad before its expiration date is an issue. Potential a massive one that could kill people. A product that remains in good condition after its expiration date is fine. As a result, expiration dates almost always occur far before the product actually expires.

wolverine876 3y ago
> They never said the helicopter would break down after 5 flights. They said it was designed for 5 flights. That is salesperson talk. NASA has been doing public communication half a century too, and they know what people will take from it.
- ygjb 3y ago
  Meh. I don't think your position makes sense. Your assessment of the estimates is basically MBA talk. They designed the helicopter for 5 flights. It is very likely the case that the requirements that a rotary wing aircraft can operate for 5 flights with minimal operator intervention, and only between missions, resulted in an helicopter that had a longer lifespan. Could they have done it cheaper? Maybe, probably, but most likely with a much higher risk of failure, and given the time, distance, and cost, and the organization doing the work, I am pretty confident that the team made the right choice.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    They designed the helicopter for at least 5 flights. It's just PR. Classic underpromising and overdelivering. NASA is a an entity that seeks public support and funding. Saying they over delivered by 16x is a good way to get the public, such as people in this thread, to think they're doing great.
    - acdha 3y ago
      It’s more than PR: it’s recognizing that there is a massively greater cost to failure because fixing even a small problem is impossible. When you’re designing something with sufficient robustness to hit that minimum success requirement, it’s almost certain that you’ll be able to exceed it by a large margin. NASA is willing to pay more to avoid failures, and given their funding model that’s almost certainly the right call. Think about it like having to get across town after work for some reason. If it’s your buddy’s party and it’ll run all night, you might take the bus or call an Uber but it’s no big deal if you’re a few minutes late. If it’s your party, you might pay to park your car nearby or have a ride waiting for you. If it’s the meeting where you’re selling your company or announcing your presidential campaign, you might have a helicopter waiting on the roof. NASA’s stuff is all like that last case because the base costs are so high - shipping anything to another planet and waiting years to do it again, if you are given the chance, costs so much more that it makes sense to pay extra to build everything with deep safety margins just so you can say the odds of failure are comfortably low.
      - aurareturn 3y ago
        It’s underpromising and over delivering. They knew internally that it could fly 16x more. They just didn’t want to say it in a statement publicly.
        rvnx 3y ago
        It also means costs and estimates are incorrect and a potential waste of public resources
        acdha 3y ago
        Again, nothing is incorrect here: a margin is only waste if you’re a Walmart MBA obsessed with lowering costs. If the DOT builds a bridge with a 70 ton rating and it doesn’t collapse when an 80 ton truck drives over it, that’s not waste but rather the engineers prudently including a safety margin in each component to protect against minor defects or inconsistencies meaning that one component being slightly under spec causes the entire system to fail. NASA and aerospace as a field traditionally have a bias towards that kind of overlapping safety margins because the kinds of failures they get destroy the entire air/space-craft. If some MBA at GE cost-optimizes your dishwasher, they’re better off trimming “waste” until it dies the day after the warranty expires as long as it doesn’t fail in a way which causes you never to buy their brand again. NASA faces far more catastrophic failures and because their systems are all custom with economy of scale for large product runs and their missions by necessity have a hefty base cost so it doesn’t make sense to save $50k on rover parts when you are paying $500M to ship it to Mars.
- bnralt 3y ago
  I've found NASA's communication to be misleading in general. A while back I tried to dive into their spinoff claims, and there were a lot of exaggerations there. There's a reason why you hear press releases from NASA saying things like "Research done on the ISS could help cure Alzheimers!", but you don't hear Alzheimer researchers going "Man, that research on the ISS really helped us piece together what was happening." Or "NASA says there's going to be a major announcement tomorrow about a discovery on Mars!", and the discoveries are usually "we've found yet more evidence that Mars used to be wet." Even the missions themselves - there's been a lot of talk about how Perseverance is collecting samples as the first part of a mission to send them back to earth. But the difficulty is in launching a return flight from Mars, something we're nowhere close to being able to do at the moment. You have to wonder how much of the sample caching is really useful, and how much is just a way to look as if were making progress on something that's still incredibly far away.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    To be clear, I'm not saying they are wasting resources, I'm saying they just underestimate.
nurettin 3y ago
Cyberdyne industries: You were designed to live for eight years. Cyberdyne industries: I never said you would die at the end! Aieee my eyes!

wolverine876 3y ago

> They never said the helicopter would break down after 5 flights. They said it was designed for 5 flights. That is salesperson talk. NASA has been doing public communication half a century too, and they know what people will take from it.

ygjb 3y ago
Meh. I don't think your position makes sense. Your assessment of the estimates is basically MBA talk. They designed the helicopter for 5 flights. It is very likely the case that the requirements that a rotary wing aircraft can operate for 5 flights with minimal operator intervention, and only between missions, resulted in an helicopter that had a longer lifespan. Could they have done it cheaper? Maybe, probably, but most likely with a much higher risk of failure, and given the time, distance, and cost, and the organization doing the work, I am pretty confident that the team made the right choice.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  They designed the helicopter for at least 5 flights. It's just PR. Classic underpromising and overdelivering. NASA is a an entity that seeks public support and funding. Saying they over delivered by 16x is a good way to get the public, such as people in this thread, to think they're doing great.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s more than PR: it’s recognizing that there is a massively greater cost to failure because fixing even a small problem is impossible. When you’re designing something with sufficient robustness to hit that minimum success requirement, it’s almost certain that you’ll be able to exceed it by a large margin. NASA is willing to pay more to avoid failures, and given their funding model that’s almost certainly the right call. Think about it like having to get across town after work for some reason. If it’s your buddy’s party and it’ll run all night, you might take the bus or call an Uber but it’s no big deal if you’re a few minutes late. If it’s your party, you might pay to park your car nearby or have a ride waiting for you. If it’s the meeting where you’re selling your company or announcing your presidential campaign, you might have a helicopter waiting on the roof. NASA’s stuff is all like that last case because the base costs are so high - shipping anything to another planet and waiting years to do it again, if you are given the chance, costs so much more that it makes sense to pay extra to build everything with deep safety margins just so you can say the odds of failure are comfortably low.
    - aurareturn 3y ago
      It’s underpromising and over delivering. They knew internally that it could fly 16x more. They just didn’t want to say it in a statement publicly.
      - rvnx 3y ago
        It also means costs and estimates are incorrect and a potential waste of public resources
        acdha 3y ago
        Again, nothing is incorrect here: a margin is only waste if you’re a Walmart MBA obsessed with lowering costs. If the DOT builds a bridge with a 70 ton rating and it doesn’t collapse when an 80 ton truck drives over it, that’s not waste but rather the engineers prudently including a safety margin in each component to protect against minor defects or inconsistencies meaning that one component being slightly under spec causes the entire system to fail. NASA and aerospace as a field traditionally have a bias towards that kind of overlapping safety margins because the kinds of failures they get destroy the entire air/space-craft. If some MBA at GE cost-optimizes your dishwasher, they’re better off trimming “waste” until it dies the day after the warranty expires as long as it doesn’t fail in a way which causes you never to buy their brand again. NASA faces far more catastrophic failures and because their systems are all custom with economy of scale for large product runs and their missions by necessity have a hefty base cost so it doesn’t make sense to save $50k on rover parts when you are paying $500M to ship it to Mars.
bnralt 3y ago
I've found NASA's communication to be misleading in general. A while back I tried to dive into their spinoff claims, and there were a lot of exaggerations there. There's a reason why you hear press releases from NASA saying things like "Research done on the ISS could help cure Alzheimers!", but you don't hear Alzheimer researchers going "Man, that research on the ISS really helped us piece together what was happening." Or "NASA says there's going to be a major announcement tomorrow about a discovery on Mars!", and the discoveries are usually "we've found yet more evidence that Mars used to be wet." Even the missions themselves - there's been a lot of talk about how Perseverance is collecting samples as the first part of a mission to send them back to earth. But the difficulty is in launching a return flight from Mars, something we're nowhere close to being able to do at the moment. You have to wonder how much of the sample caching is really useful, and how much is just a way to look as if were making progress on something that's still incredibly far away.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  To be clear, I'm not saying they are wasting resources, I'm saying they just underestimate.

nurettin 3y ago

Cyberdyne industries: You were designed to live for eight years. Cyberdyne industries: I never said you would die at the end! Aieee my eyes!