[kemfic]

Ingenuity's mission proposal makes sense here; It was developed as a tech demo as opposed to an operational one. A significant part of the drone was using COTS components (namely a Snapdragon 801 of all things) that weren't even rad-hardened and was exposed to all sorts of radiation for an extended period of time in space. With most missions the tradeoff is typically between risk and reliability, and even one flight on this thing involves a very large risk - 4 initial flights seems relatively reasonable.

[kemfic]

Met a few engineers involved with the project, they did mention they ran into a lot of issues internally since the teams on Perseverance gave significant pushback to make sure that it didn't jeopardize the mission. Ingenuity's only a second priority on Mars 2020