[flashback2199]

A counterpoint to his thesis that the orbit and design have to be simple to succeed is the Mars rover sky crane lander system. It was terribly complex and, famously, worked very well. Compute has made a big difference since the 60s. Roughly every line of code today used to be a handful of physical components, whether it was an analog circuit or additional core memory wire-wound in the flight computer. Then there's the fact we test differently today because we finite element analysis every part down to the smallest component. That wasn't possible in the 60s.