[hfe]

> If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful" NASA was.

And rightly so. The solution isn't to not try. The solution is to continue investing. See the Apollo missions. Lots of failure there, but it wasn't a waste because it did eventually succeed, both in its mission and also in bringing a bunch of technological advancement. Investing a ton of money into some venture, only to give up on it after the first failure is something we should all be angry about. If its worth doing, its worth trying again when it fails.

[mlyle]

I agree, but this also means "investing in smaller chunks." We're stacking missions up to be so complicated that they're really expensive and the first try really has to succeed. We need to figure out how to get smaller chunks so that individual ones can fail.

[pclmulqdq]

Yes. A lot of the innovation in space recently has been about making space missions cheaper. NASA and JPL still do these huge multi-billion-dollar headliner missions, but the democratization of space is an underrepresented story in the public view of space. It's still hard to get far from orbit cheaply, though.

[mlyle]

Yup. Actually, I'm advisor for a high school team that was selected by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative to put a satellite in LEO, mostly to do space technology development and demonstration. The growth of rideshare and dedicated small satellite launch missions has been impressive to watch in the past couple of decades.

Getting out of LEO has a lot of challenges; the delta V is expensive, but also survivability away from Earth's thermal radiation and magnetic field gets harder. This has a compounding effect where costs and scope run away; if you need to buy expensive launch, rad-hard hardware and do exotic things for power and heating, you want to amortize the fixed portions of these over more science...