There's something so slow and then tremendously fast about space exploration. Your blog post was a little bit over seven years ago. It must be nerve-wracking t

There's something so slow and then tremendously fast about space exploration. Your blog post was a little bit over seven years ago. It must be nerve-wracking to be on the engineering team for these projects. You spend years building the craft then there's this long wait until it gets near the destination. Now the world is all of a sudden watching you. A failure might be a career or reputation killer as well, and for nothing you did wrong or could avoid. This makes me think about the failure of the Beagle 2. Colin Pillinger's star faded pretty quickly after that. Turns out it landed during a dust storm which thinned the atmosphere which meant parachutes were deployed too late (deployed by barometric pressure?). Its remains on Mars show that its solar panels still folded. Its assumed it hit the surface so hard that the motors needed to open them failed to operate. I believe the cost was pretty close to 100m USD. Not super expensive, but certainly not cheap, especially for the ESA. And the waiting game continues: > [Dawn] won’t be sending back any pictures or data until late April