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> Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed How many experiments got aborted so he could spend the time to get his pet project working?

• gumby 3y ago
  Indeed, I was thinking of this too when I wrote my comment. It's natural to tightly schedule people when you think of the mission cost in $/minute. The problem is too tight a schedule is an engineering problem related to other ones we know like too thin a supply chain, too small a cache etc. You need to put slack in your schedule to account for unplanned events -- the whole point of having humans there is to be able to respond to unplanned events, right? Startups go into crunch mode when certain deadlines approach, but knowingly abandon other goals in the process (when companies don't, you end up in a death march). These missions are short enough that crunch is valid -- but another way of restating my point is: shouldn't the goal be that as many of the experiments you paid to get into orbit actually happen?
• krisoft 3y ago
  Well, wouldn’t it have been nice if the article tried to answer this same question? Instead of fluffing the nothing. Or why did they send specialist if they didn’t want him to use his specialisation?