The lack of integrated testing was by far the most impressive thing about the Curiosity Rover/MSL landing to me. Most people who followed the news had no idea t

The lack of integrated testing was by far the most impressive thing about the Curiosity Rover/MSL landing to me. Most people who followed the news had no idea that the skycrane deployment setup was never actually tested in full. They validated components, like the hydrazine engines, radar, and bridle release mechanism, but not the combination of all. Software and circuits scale through abstraction and the static discipline. But combining atoms just gets harder and harder. (This sort of thing also happens when constructing buildings or bridges, but there's usually not a million different points for potential catastrophic failure.)