You set your initial goals low, so you can achieve them, especially if you’re depended on public funding.

It’s a great successes story, if they flew and met all their original goals, and then just try to extend it. It’s much different story, if initial plan would be for example for 20 flights, but it’ll break after 15th. Then you have failure, people questioning why we spent so much money on failed mission, etc.

Plus, it’s easier to ask for $x billion dollars for the mission, meet all the goals and then ask for few extra $ to support extending already proven and successful mission, then to ask for higher amount from a start.

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that this is related to funding for staffing in command centers and such. "Fly it until it breaks" means that somebody must approve an uncertain and ongoing expense without any results to show for it.

If you re-frame it as an initial experimental mission, it's a smaller and more defined budgetary request. You can outline potential extra-time scenarios, but presumably those are a lot easier to get approval for after the initial window is a success.

edit: It also occurs to me that framing it as a series of smaller phases with well-defined goals and benefits also makes it easier to communicate a straightforward message to the broader public about the mission.

Helicopter requires rover to be near by as means of communications as helicopter itself can not directly communicate. Thus, it originally had a limited time as the rover needs to move on to other activities.

Planning and funding come in chunks, you get X set of people for Y months/years with access to Z resources to accomplish goals A,B,C,etc. If it's successful you're likely to get more time and some subset of the resources if there's still interesting science to be done (and there usually is, our questions are nearly endless compared to the resources available on the rovers). Doing it on an open ended mission doesn't really match how government funding works.

Time; perseverance has had to stay close by; using our most precious resource in space —- time.

It is also all about a cost benefit using the team here to plan missions; rather than shift into a new project.

Basically what this says is, this little machine can still teach us something.

I believe perseverance is now going to move further away; but they have proven more reliable communication links so believe they can stretch the envelope.

Don’t learn a lot of this stuff until your on another planet.

Because NASA knows valuable it is to under-promise and over-deliver.