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by XorNot
2020 days ago
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This is a lot of words to basically project a motivation onto the reporting about a thing which actually happened that isn't there. You're getting downvoted because this reads as "concern trolling". Let everyone else manage their own feelings. |
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> Missions marked with an asterisk were considered failures (5 spacecraft failed in space; 1 project was canceled), putting the overall FBC success rate at a paltry 63%. This low success rate—and the fact that 4 of them occurred in one year, 1999—are what linger in the space community’s memory.
> For example, an examination of the timeline reveals an often-missed observation: the first 9 of 10 missions were successful, a 90% success rate. The FBC approach broke when proposed missions began getting more ambitious without a change in schedule and cost cap. The early successes made everyone overconfident and the missions became too aggressive for their constraints, leading to failures (Launius and McCurdy 2005):
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> “In hindsight, it becomes apparent that [NASA’s] success in the nineties had led the review and selection committees to accept very ambitious and complex proposals with a very high science return on budgets and schedules that were quite optimistic.”
http://www.elizabethafrank.com/colliding-worlds/fbc
Pathfinder and Sojourner demonstrated new technologies and were done on a budget smaller than one of Viking's experiments. The failures soured the public memory, lead to congressional hearings, and funding cuts.
The public is a fickle master.