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by elzbardico 1415 days ago
But, did the project significantly advance the knowledge in the field, even if the deliverable couldn't be completed?

In that case, I would call it a success anyway.

1 comments

It produced some modest results which slightly advanced the field. Not groundbreaking. The applied work did demonstrate the viability of a few robotics applications and the infeasibility/insufficient ROI of a few others. I would say that was the most valuable output.

It did not begin to approach the goals in the project description, which I've since come to believe are detached from reality. A moonshot may have seemed collossally ambitious in 1961 but we already had most of the basic capabilities necessary to succeed. In this case, however, I don't think we're anywhere close, and even if we were, it would be a suboptimal solution to the problem it's meant to solve. (It would however be politically and economically convenient).