[sigstoat]

> NASA routinely launches things into space designed to last a few weeks that end up lasting for a decade or more because they are so amazingly overengineered.

i worked on some of those. they're not overengineered, they're underpromised.

and no, i can't provide a source for that because the whole point is to look good to the public. there's not a line in the proposals about how long things are _actually_ supposed to last if you want to ever get another contract.

if the delivery estimates were good, we'd see a nice uniform distribution about expected lifetime. instead we see everything lasting so much longer than "expected". if we're attributing it to the engineers, then that's bad engineering. but the discrepancy isn't the fault of the engineers.