[sjburt]

There are many people in NASA and around that have made similar arguments.

I think the real reason that they never have a lot of traction, sadly, is that if you propose 3, Congress will give you 2. And then when 2 are over budget, it will get trimmed to one. Better to propose one big mission and get it to the point where it can’t be cut easily.

[dwohnitmok]

Yeah when you have a fickle funding source often the only way to get any long-term project done is to make it too big to fail, but then you see all the other terrible waste, corruption, etc. that accompanies that.