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by foxglacier 466 days ago
Legged landers have also been proven to work on the moon many times. I suspect the reason for this thinking is that engineers like to find technical solutions to problems but when the only information you have is "it fell over", the only apparent technical solutions are to use different concepts that can't fall over. Once you know more specifics of why it failed, you'd be thinking of ways to prevent those, like maybe correct the software bug or implement redundant sensors or whatever. The troubles with these landers won't be something as difficult as "Reliably balancing a slender object upright is beyond the cutting edge of technology" since that problem has been thoroughly solved in other contexts like Falcon 9 and Segway.