Yes, you know, I had forgotten about the rush, and I worked at JPL during that time. Obviously not on the Mars rovers, or I would have remembered ;-). Curious

Yes, you know, I had forgotten about the rush, and I worked at JPL during that time. Obviously not on the Mars rovers, or I would have remembered ;-). Curiousity, the current rover, missed its original launch window and had to be delayed -- but by then, our confidence in ability to land spacecraft on Mars had been restored, so there was patience. The really funny thing is, after an article patiently explaining the constraints (need to manage risk after losing two Mars-bound spacecraft, time line for Earth-Mars launch window, weight on the airbag lander) there are still people (see the comments in the article) who want to solve the problem with the methods dismissed in the article above their comment. E.g., use "a can of compressed air" ("put it in a hollow leg, it would add no more than a few grams"), or a "beater bar" or "squirrel fan". It's like bikeshedding, but by people who don't get that it is a spacecraft and not a bike shed. It's one thing to ask a question ("Why didn't they...") and another thing to assume the engineers missed something obvious ("Fools! They should have...").