There's a sci-fi short story about the NASA (?) bureaucracy sending an "auxiliary maintenance system" (re: astronaut) to fix its Mars lander robots when they br

There's a sci-fi short story about the NASA (?) bureaucracy sending an "auxiliary maintenance system" (re: astronaut) to fix its Mars lander robots when they break, even though the same agency refused to send a person. I can't remember the author; knowing 90s me, it'd be Asimov, Clarke, Pournelle, Niven, etc.